Download or read book Berkeley Noir written by Jim Nisbet and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixteen storytellers shed light on the darkness that lurks in the California city in this fun collection of crime tales. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. With stories by: Barry Gifford, Jim Nisbet, Lexi Pandell, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Mara Faye Lethem, Thomas Burchfield, Shanthi Sekaran, Nick Mamatas, Kimn Neilson, Jason S. Ridler, Susan Dunlap, J.M. Curet, Summer Brenner, Michael David Lukas, Aya de León, and Owen Hill. Praise for Berkeley Noir “Each story evokes the dark side of a Berkeley neighborhood and pays tribute both to the city's history as a haven for outcasts and as a literary metropolis. If you race through it, consider picking up San Francisco Noir and Oakland Noir.” —Diablo Magazine, a Top Ticket choice “In “Lucky Day,” Thomas Burchfield reveals the evil that can come when a well-meaning aide breaks his boss’s cardinal rule never to allow patrons into the library early. A worried mom from Holloway wangles her son a prized place in the Berkeley school district in Aya de León’s “Frederick Douglass Elementary.” . . . . J.M. Curet’s “Wifebeater Tank Top,” the tale with the firmest criminal pedigree, is the most violent, but its poetic language and come-from-nowhere ending make it the best.” —Kirkus Reviews “The 16 stories set in Berkeley, Calif., in this above average Akashic noir anthology offer little actual noir but a heaping helping of crime, with almost every entry featuring at least a murder or kidnapping . . . . Readers will be glad that many of these tales are fun in a way that traditional noir isn’t.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Oakland Noir written by Jerry Thompson and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Wonderfully, in Akashic’s Oakland Noir, the stereotypes about the city suffer the fate of your average noir character—they die brutally.” —San Francisco Chronicle In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir—all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series—comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller (the “Czar of Noir”), this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint. Oakland Noir offers stories by Nick Petrulakis, Kim Addonizio, Keenan Norris, Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder, Katie Gilmartin, Dorothy Lazard, Harry Louis Williams II, Carolyn Alexander, Phil Canalin, Judy Juanita, Jamie DeWolf, Nayomi Munaweera, Mahmud Rahman, Tom McElravey, Joe Loya, and Eddie Muller. “From the Oakland hills to the heart of downtown, each story brings Oakland to life.” —San Jose Mercury News “Oakland is a natural for the series, with its shadowy crimes and disgruntled cops.” —Zoom Street Magazine “San Francisco’s grittier next-door neighbor gets her day in the sun in 16 new stories in this tightly curated entry in Akashic’s Noir series. The hardscrabble streets of Oakland offer crime aplenty . . . Thompson and Muller have taken such pains to choose stories highlighting Oakland’s diversity and history that the result is a volume rich in local culture as well as crime.” —Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book Palm Springs Noir Akashic Noir written by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Palm Springs now joins Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley in California’s Noir Series arena. “Contrary to popular belief, noir doesn’t require a bleak city street for its setting. Nor water, for that matter. Noir thrives on secrets, lies and lust, all flowing plentifully through the jewel in the Coachella Valley’s fragile crown . . . For all the playfulness of the genre and the location, the wisecracks and the kidney-shaped pools, there is an unmanageable darkness waiting to seep in, like so much blood in the pool water.” —Los Angeles Times Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: T. Jefferson Parker, Janet Fitch, Eric Beetner, Kelly Shire, Tod Goldberg, Michael Craft, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Rob Roberge, J.D. Horn, Eduardo Santiago, Rob Bowman, Chris J. Bahnsen, Ken Layne, and Alex Espinoza.

Download or read book Seattle Noir written by Curt Colbert and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Featuring short, edgy fiction on the Emerald City’s seamy underbelly . . . seedy characters, private detectives and the like from all over urban Seattle.” —Kitsap Daily News Early Seattle was a hardscrabble seaport filled with merchant sailors, longshoremen, lumberjacks, rowdy saloons, and a rough-and-tumble police force not immune to corruption and graft. Now it’s home to big businesses and a flourishing art, theatre, and club scene. Seattle’s evolution to high-finance and high-tech has simply provided even greater opportunity and reward to those who might be ethically, morally, or economically challenged (crooks, in other words). Seattle Noir features stories by G.M. Ford, Skye Moody, R. Barri Flowers, Thomas P. Hopp, Patricia Harrington, Bharti Kirchner, Kathleen Alcalá, Simon Wood, Brian Thornton, Lou Kemp, Curt Colbert, Robert Lopresti, Paul S. Piper, and Stephan Magcosta. You’ll find tales of a wealthy couple whose marriage is filled with not-so-quiet desperation; a credit card scam that goes over-limit; femmes fatales and hommes fatales; a group of mystery writers whose fiction causes friction; a Native American shaman caught in a web of secrets and tribal allegiances; sex, lies, and slippery slopes . . . “Stories that reflect Seattle’s ethnic diversity as well as tales from its rough past to its glory days of Boeing, Starbucks and Microsoft.” —Publishers Weekly “A new collection of stories all set in Seattle, with characters that break the mold. In many of the Seattle Noir stories, it’s the heroes, not the subsidiary characters, that are African-American, Native-American, Hispanic-American.” —The Seattle Times

Download or read book More Than Night written by James Naremore and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-01-14 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Supplies the first study of film noir that achieves the sort of intellectual seriousness, depth of research, degree of critical insight, and level of writing that this group of films deserves."—Tom Gunning, Modernism and Modernity

Download or read book Scandinavian Noir written by Wendy Lesser and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Even those unmoved by its subject will thrill to [Scandinavian Noir], a beautifully crafted inquiry into fiction, reality, crime and place . . . Perhaps when it comes to fiction and reality, what we need most are critics like Lesser, who can dissect the former with the tools of the latter." --Kate Tuttle, The New York Times Book Review An in-depth and personal exploration of Scandinavian crime fiction as a way into Scandinavian culture at large For nearly four decades, Wendy Lesser's primary source of information about three Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—was mystery and crime novels, and the murders committed and solved in their pages. Having never visited the region, Lesser constructed a fictional Scandinavia of her own making, something between a map, a portrait, and a cultural history of a place that both exists and does not exist. Lesser’s Scandinavia is disproportionately populated with police officers, but also with the stuff of everyday life, the likes of which are relayed in great detail in the novels she read: a fully realized world complete with its own traditions, customs, and, of course, people. Over the course of many years, Lesser’s fictional Scandinavia grew more and more solidly visible to her, yet she never had a strong desire to visit the real countries that corresponded to the made-up ones. Until, she writes, “between one day and the next, that no longer seemed sufficient.” It was time to travel to Scandinavia. With vivid storytelling and an astonishing command of the literature, Wendy Lesser’s Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery illuminates the vast, peculiar world of Scandinavian noir—first as it appears on the page, then as it grows in her mind, and finally, in the summer of 2018, as it exists in reality. Guided by sharp criticism, evocative travel writing, and a whimsical need to discover “the difference between existence and imagination, reality and dream,” Scandinavian Noir is a thrilling and inventive literary adventure from a masterful writer and critic.

Download or read book Buzz written by Jeffrey Spivak and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2011 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Depression was defined by poverty and despair, but visionary American filmmaker Busby Berkeley (1895-1976) managed to divert the public's attention away from the economic crash with some of the most iconic movies of all time. Known for his kaleidoscopic dance numbers featuring multitudes of performers in extravagant costumes, his musicals provided a brief respite for an audience whose reality was hard and bitter. Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley is a revealing study of the director, drawing from interviews with his colleagues, newspaper and legal records, and Berkeley's own unpublished memoirs to uncover the life of a Hollywood legend renowned for his talent and creativity. Jeffrey Spivak examines how Berkeley's career evolved from creating musical numbers for other directors in films such as 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) to directing his own pictures, such as Strike up the Band (1940) and The Gang's All Here (1943). Though Berkeley claimed he was no choreographer, his movies revitalized the public's waning interest in musical pictures. While other popular filmmakers advertised their works specifically as nonmusical, Berkeley embraced his niche, eventually becoming the premier dance director of his time. However, the happy face Berkeley presented publicly did not necessarily reflect his life. Offstage and away from the set, the director met with scandal, and his fondness for liquor and women was well known. In September 1935, he was involved in a car accident that left three people dead and four others severely injured. Accused of driving under the influence, he was put on trial for second-degree murder. The accident significantly changed the nature of his stardom.

Download or read book Nabokov Noir written by Luke Parker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nabokov Noir places Vladimir Nabokov's early literary career—from the 1920s to the 1940s—in the context of his fascination with silent and early sound cinema and the chiaroscuro darkness and artificial brightness of the Weimar era, with its movie palaces, cultural Americanism, and surface culture. Luke Parker argues that Nabokov's engagement with the cinema and the dynamics of mass culture more broadly is an art of exile, understood both as literary poetics and practical strategy. Obsessive and competitive, fascinated and disturbed, Nabokov's Russian-language fiction and essays, written in Berlin, present a compelling rethinking of modernist-era literature's relationship to an unabashedly mass cultural phenomenon. Parker examines how Nabokov's involvement with the cinema as actor, screenwriter, moviegoer, and, above all, chronicler of the cinematized culture of interwar Europe enabled him to flourish as a transnational writer. Nabokov, Parker shows, worked tirelessly to court publishers and film producers for maximum exposure for his fiction across languages, media, and markets. In revealing the story of Nabokov's cinema praxis—his strategic instrumentalization of the movie industry—Nabokov Noir reconstructs the deft response of a modern master to the artificial isolation and shrinking audiences of exile.

Download or read book The New Noir written by Orly Clerge and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The expansion of the Black American middle class and the unprecedented increase in the number of Black immigrants since the 1960s have transformed the cultural landscape of New York. In The New Noir, Orly Clerge explores the richly complex worlds of an extraordinary generation of Black middle class adults who have migrated from different corners of the African diaspora to suburbia. The Black middle class today consists of diverse groups whose ongoing cultural, political, and material ties to the American South and Global South shape their cultural interactions at work, in their suburban neighborhoods, and at their kitchen tables. Clerge compellingly analyzes the making of a new multinational Black middle class and how they create a spectrum of Black identities that help them carve out places of their own in a changing 21st-century global city. Paying particular attention to the largest Black ethnic groups in the country, Black Americans, Jamaicans, and Haitians, Clerge’s ethnography draws on over 80 interviews with residents to examine the overlooked places where New York’s middle class resides in Queens and Long Island. This book reveals that region and nationality shape how the Black middle class negotiates the everyday politics of race and class.

Download or read book Pacific Pinot Noir written by John Winthrop Haeger and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-11-17 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for North American Pinot Noir: "Every religion needs its scripture. Now pinot noir worshipers have theirs."—Carol Emert, San Francisco Chronicle "A great resource . . . . Exciting, thought-provoking reading."—Tara Q. Thomas, Wine & Spirits magazine

Download or read book Black France France Noire written by Trica Danielle Keaton and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Black France / France Noire, scholars, activists, and novelists address the paradox of race in France: the state does not acknowledge race as a meaningful category, but experiences of antiblack racism belie claims of color-blindness.

Download or read book Noir Urbanisms written by Gyan Prakash and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism. Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges in Noir Urbanisms is the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience. In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rubén Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang.

Download or read book The American Roman Noir written by William Marling and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The American Roman Noir, William Marling reads classic hard-boiled fiction and film in the contexts of narrative theories and American social and cultural history. His search for the origins of the dark narratives that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s leads to a sweeping critique of Jazz-Age and Depression-era culture. Integrating economic history, biography, consumer product design, narrative analysis, and film scholarship, Marling makes new connections between events of the 1920s and 1930s and the modes, styles, and genres of their representation. At the center of Marling's approach is the concept of "prodigality": how narrative represents having, and having had, too much. Never before in the country, he argues, did wealth impinge on the national conscience as in the 1920s, and never was such conscience so sharply rebuked as in the 1930s. What, asks Marling, were the paradigms that explained accumulation and windfall, waste and failure? Marling first establishes a theoretical and historical context for the notion of prodigality. Among the topics he discusses are such watershed events as the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and the premiere of the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer; technology's alteration of Americans' perceptive and figurative habits; and the shift from synecdochical to metonymical values entailed by a consumer society. Marling then considers six noir classics, relating them to their authors' own lives and to the milieu of prodigality that produced them and which they sought to explain: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely. Reading these narratives first as novels, then as films, Marling shows how they employed the prodigality fabula's variations and ancillary value systems to help Americans adapt--for better or worse--to a society driven by economic and technological forces beyond their control.

Download or read book San Diego Noir written by Maryelizabeth Hart and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2011-05-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southern California is not all sun, sand, and surf in this gripping collection of noir tales from T. Jefferson Parker, Don Winslow, Maria Lima, and others. San Diego is home to miles of beaches, Balboa Park, a world-famous zoo, and some of the country’s most expensive home and resort real estate. Yet the city also houses a few items that aren’t actively promoted by the visitor’s bureau: a number of the country’s most corrupt politicians, border-related crimes, terrorists, and the occasional earthquakes. A noir feast! In the fifty-plus years since Raymond Chandler set Playback in Esmeralda, his name for La Jolla, the population has grown by more than a million, and crime has proliferated as well. San Diego of the past and the present offers the book’s contributors a rich selection of settings, from the cross on Mount Soledad to the piers of Ocean Beach, and perpetrators and victims from the residents of its wealthiest enclaves to the inhabitants of its segregated barrios. San Diego Noir includes stories by T. Jefferson Parker, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Martha C. Lawrence, Diane Clark & Astrid Bear, Debra Ginsberg, Morgan Hunt, Ken Kuhlken, Taffy Cannon, Don Winslow, Cameron Pierce Hughes, Lisa Brackmann, Gabriel R. Barillas, Gar Anthony Haywood, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Maria Lima. “When it’s done right, noir is a darkly delicious thrill: smart, sharp-tongued, surprising. The knife goes in at the end with a twist. San Diego Noir, a new 15-story collection by some of the region’s best writers, has all that going for it, and the steady supply of hometown references makes it even more fun.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

Download or read book The Annotated Big Sleep written by Raymond Chandler and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first fully annotated edition of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 classic The Big Sleep features hundreds of illuminating notes and images alongside the full text of the novel and is an essential addition to any crime fiction fan’s library. A masterpiece of noir, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep helped to define a genre. Today it remains one of the most celebrated and stylish novels of the twentieth century. This comprehensive, annotated edition offers a fascinating look behind the scenes of the novel, bringing the gritty and seductive world of Chandler's iconic private eye Philip Marlowe to life. The Annotated Big Sleep solidifies the novel’s position as one of the great works of American fiction and will surprise and enthrall Chandler’s biggest fans. Including: -Personal letters and source texts -The historical context of Chandler’s Los Angeles, including maps and images -Film stills and art from the early pulps -An analysis of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in the novel

Download or read book Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles written by Mark Shiel and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood cinema and Los Angeles cannot be understood apart. Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles traces the interaction of the real city, its movie business, and filmed image, focusing on the crucial period from the construction of the first studios in the 1910s to the decline of the studio system fifty years later. As Los Angeles gradually became one of the ten largest cities in the world, the film industry made key contributions to its rapid growth and frequent crises in economic, social, political and cultural life. Whether filmmakers engaged with the real city on location or recreated it on a studio set, Los Angeles shaped the films that were made there and circulated influentially worldwide. The book pays particular attention to early cinema, slapstick comedy, movies about the movies and film noir, which are each explored in new ways, with an emphasis on urban and architectural space and its representation, as well as filmmaking style and technique. Including many previously unpublished photographs and new historical evidence, Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles gives us a never-before-seen view of the City of Angels.

Download or read book The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021 written by Steph Cha and published by Mariner Books. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steph Cha, a rising star who brings a fresh perspective as series editor, takes the helm of the new The Best American Mystery and Suspense, with best-selling crime novelist Alafair Burke joining her as the first guest editor. "Crime writers, forgive the pun, are killing it right now creatively," writes guest editor Alafair Burke in her introduction. "It was difficult--painful even--to narrow this year's Best American Mystery and Suspense to only twenty stories." Spanning from a mediocre spa in Florida, to New York's gritty East Village, to death row in Alabama, this collection reveals boundless suspense in small, quiet moments, offering startling twists in the least likely of places. From a powerful response to hateful bullying, to a fight for health care, to a gripping desperation to vote, these stories are equal parts shocking, devastating, and enthralling, revealing the tension pulsing through our everyday lives and affirming that mystery and suspense writing is better than ever before. The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021includes JENNY BHATT- GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD- GABINO IGLESIAS- AYA DE LEÓN- LAURA LIPPMAN DELIA C. PITTS- ALEX SEGURA- FAYE SNOWDEN- LISA UNGER and others