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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Dennis Lehane returns to coedit, with Cotton & Clarke, the sequel to the best-selling evergreen anthology Boston Noir, culling classic stories from the city's dark literary legacy.

"The contributor list is delightfully quirky . . . The collection's unifying element is a deep understanding of Boston's Byzantine worlds of race and class—as seen terrifyingly in Andre Dubus's tale of mill town resentment and pampered preppies." —Boston Globe

Featuring stories by: Linda Barnes, Jason Brown, Andre Dubus, Chuck Hogan, George Harrar, George V. Higgins, Dennis Lehane, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert B. Parker, David Ryan, Kenneth Abel, Barbara Neely, Hannah Tinti, and David Foster Wallace.

From the introduction by Jaime Clarke, Mary Cotton, & Dennis Lehane:

"What is noir and what is not inhabits a gray area. Its definition is continually expanding from the previous generation's agreed-upon notion that noir involves men in fedoras smoking cigarettes on street corners. Noir alludes to crime, sure, but it also evokes bleak elements, danger, tragedy, sleaze, all of which is best represented by its root French definition: black. We used this idea as our guide for this sequel to the best-selling Boston Noir anthology . . .

"The commonwealth is an endless source of fascinating landscapes: the autumnal light spreading across the Charles River; the ice floes in the wintry Boston Harbor; a spring air tantalizing leaves in Harvard Yard; the salty taste of summer as sunbathers peer into the horizon, shielding their eyes from the glare, squinting into the middle distance. Beyond the postcard fabric, though, lies a community populated by broken families, criminal minds, voyeurs, and outsiders. They look like you and me. These are their stories."

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 24, 2012
      The 14 superior selections in this “classics” volume in Akashic’s series of regional dark crime short stories, the works of established writers that have stood the test of time, collectively outshine the originals that appeared in Boston Noir. Perhaps the highlight is Linda Barnes’s “Lucky Penny,” about a female PI who must drive a cab to make ends meet. Three entries are excerpts from novels. The one taken from Barbara Neely’s Blanche Cleans Up, which features a cleaning-lady detective in Brookline, succeeds as a stand-alone, while another, a section of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, does not. Locale figures prominently in all the stories, especially Chuck Hogan’s clever “The Marriage Privilege,” set in West Roxbury. And no such volume would be complete without Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, who would be a cod out of water anywhere but Boston, represented by the taut “Surrogate,” a story that hasn’t appeared widely in the U.S. before.

    • Booklist

      November 15, 2012
      Unlike the first Boston Noir (2009)and, indeed, unlike the Noir series as a wholethis collection features crime stories that have already been published. But that's OK when you have the likes of Chuck Hogan, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert B. Parker, Linda Barnes, George V. Higgins, Dennis Lehane, and David Foster Wallace all under the same roof. Parker's Surrogate, from 1982, offers Spenser fans a very early look at their favorite Boston PI; an excerpt from Infinite Jest, Wallace's 1996 novel set in an ironic near future, should send readers to the library to either read or reread the whole book; Barnes' Lucky Penny offers readers the debut appearance of fan favorite Carlotta Carlyle; and the outstanding stories from Lehane and Hogan are each worth the price of admission all by themselves. Followers of Akashic's long-running Noir seriesnot to mention, of course, fans of Boston-set crime fictionshould eagerly devour this one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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