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Reverse-Gentrification of the Literary World

Akashic Books

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Category: Mondays Are Murder

Mondays Are Murder: Original Noir Fiction to Get Your Week off to a Dark Start

Launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir, our award-winning city-based Noir Series now has over 60 volumes in print, with many more to come. Each volume is overseen by an editor with intimate knowledge of the title city; each story is brand new from a local author, and each is set within a distinct neighborhood or location.

While we’ve been thrilled to publish the original works of over 800 authors in the series, we still long for more. And while we are constantly seeking homegrown editors with native knowledge of national and international cities not yet visited by the series, we’re eager to dig deeper.

Mondays Are Murder allows us to offer a glimpse of cities not yet seen, neighborhoods or hidden corners not yet explored in previous volumes, and, we hope, writers not yet exposed to our company. Contributions to the Akashic Noir Series are bound by mood: our authors are challenged to capture the sometimes intangible moods of “noir” and of “place”. The stories run the gamut from darkly-toned literary glimpses to straight-up crime fiction, while similarly capturing the unique aura of the story’s location.

Our web model for the series has one further dimension: A 750-word limit. Sound like murder? It is. But so are Mondays.

“Puccini’s Baseball” by Harol Marshall

Sal Puccini cruised down Main Street past the Baseball Hall of Fame and a lifetime of bad memories. Thirty years and nothing had changed—same small-town redbrick buildings, same sheen on the lake, same irritating kid brother . . .

“Dark Carnival” by Suzanne LaBerge

Angie made Ed jealous, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. She loved to drink and flirt. Drugs too, if somebody else was buying. But after Katrina it was different. Most of the bars were closed, most of the men gone to Baton Rouge, Houston, who knew where . . .