Click here to see more titles in the Akashic Noir Series.

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.

All original stories from Paris' finest authors, all translated from French.

Brand-new stories by: Didier Daeninckx, Jean-Bernard Pouy, Marc Villard, Chantal Pelletier, Patrick Pecherot, DOA, Herve Prudon, Dominique Mainard, Salim Bachi, Jerome Leroy, Laurent Martin, and Christophe Mercier.

Twelve short stories, twelve points of view, twelve neighborhoods of the same town, and finally, twelve pieces of the same puzzle.

Paris Noir takes you on a ride through the old medieval center of town with its intertwined streets, its ghosts, and its secrets buried in history. You'll cruise Paris with its nightclubs full of mysterious beauties who seem to have a lot to hide. You'll meet a driver with a big heart who decides to save a beaten prostitute by all means necessary, a politician knowing too much living his lasts moments in a French brasserie full of cigarette smoke, old and tired mobsters settling scores in Pigalle on Christmas Eve.

But Paris Noir is not only an homage to the crime genre, to Melville and Godard, it's also an invitation to French fiction. Besides the crime world, we discover the everyday people: a waiter who goes on a search after his best client disappears; a lunatic living on rue de la Sante, the only street in Paris where you can find a prison, a psychiatric hospital, and the traces of onetime resident Samuel Beckett; and a young beauty who believes she will be the next big star of a reality-TV show.

Crime, gunfights, twisted love stories, and shattered dreams, Paris Noir offers an explosive and poetic cocktail. Contrary to what certain people say, France is not Old Europe and Paris is certainly not a museum.

Aurelien Masson was born in 1975 and quit academia at the age of twenty-four to take a trip around the world. After three years as an editorial assistant for la Serie Noire at Gallimard, one of France's leading publishing companies, he became the series director.