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Launched by the summer '04 award-winning, best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Scroll down for full table of contents.
Brand new stories by: Jerome Charyn, Lawrence Block, Suzanne Chazin, Terrence Cheng, Pat Picciarelli, Abraham Rodriguez Jr., Kevin Baker, S.J. Rozan, Steven Torres, and others.
The Bronx is the only New York City Borough on the mainland of North America. Which doesn't stop it from being a country all its own. As any Bronxite will tell you, being from Da Bronx is a permanent condition, no matter where you end up, and Bronx Geography is played from Alaska to Florida, from Paris to Trinidad. Originally a huge farm estate belonging to one Jacob Bronck ("Yonkers? Where's that?" "Just north of the Broncks'." Get it?), the borough has as many diverse social ecosystems as the Amazon has biological ones.
For a time in the '70s and '80s the name was synonymous (to non-Bronxites) with a vast urban maelstrom of lawlessness and decay. But the place was always more complicated than that. There's the Bronx Zoo, and the Botanical Garden; there are universities and Yankee Stadium, grand estates and squalid housing projects, the sinking Concourse and nautical City Island.
This is not to say crime isn't, potentially, everywhere. Just that the Bronx has more everywheres than most people imagine. The writers represented in Bronx Noir know the borough so well that, reading the book, you'll smell it, feel it, see it, hear it. The sights and scents will be multitudinous and as distinct as the neighborhoods. And everyone of them, in all their glorious mutual contradiction, is the Bronx.
S.J. Rozan was born and raised in the Bronx and is a life-long New Yorker. She's the author of eight novels in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, and the standalones Absent Friends and In This Rain. Her book Winter and Night won the Edgar, Nero, and Macavity Awards for Best Novel, and was nominated for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards. Two of her previous books have won the Shamus for Best Novel and another won the Anthony for Best Novel. Her short story "Double-crossing Delancey" won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. She's at work on another series novel, Shanghai Moon.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I: BRING IT ON HOME
"White Trash" JEROME CHARYN (Claremont/Concourse)
"Gold Mountain" TERRENCE CHENG (Lehman College)
"Hey, Girlie" JOANNE DOBSON (Sedgwick Avenue)
"The Woman Who Hated the Bronx" RITA LAKIN (Elder Avenue)
PART II: IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT
"Rude Awakening" LAWRENCE BLOCK (Riverdale)
"Burnout" SUZANNE CHAZIN (Jerome Avenue)
"The Cheers Like Waves" KEVIN BAKER (Yankee Stadium)
"Jaguar" ABRAHAM RODRIGUEZ, JR. (South Bronx)
PART III: ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT
"Early Fall" STEVEN TORRES (Hunts Point)
"Hothouse" S.J. ROZAN (Botanical Garden)
"Lost and Found" THOMAS BENTIL (Rikers Island)
"Look What Love Is Doing to Me" MARLON JAMES (Williamsbridge)
PART IV: THE WANDERER
"Home Sweet Home" SANDRA KITT (City Island)
"A Visit to St. Nick's" ROBERT J. HUGHES (Fordham Road)
"Numbers Up" MILES MARSHALL LEWIS (Baychester)
"The Big Five" JOSEPH WALLACE (Bronx Zoo)
PART V: ALL SHOOK UP
"Ernie K.'s Gelding" ED DEE (Van Cortlandt Park)
"The Prince of Arthur Avenue" PATRICK W. PICCIARELLI (Arthur Avenue)
"You Want I Should Whack Monkey Boy?" THOMAS ADCOCK (Courthouse)