Montana Noir
Description
"Montana may not have the back alleys so common to noir but it has western justice which can be quick, brutal and final and that is as satisfying as anything found in the urban streets that typically attract the dark beauty of the noir genre." --New York Journal of Books
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 location within the geographic area of the book. Grady and Graff, both Montana natives, masterfully curate this collection of hard-edged Western tales.
Brand-new stories by: David Abrams, Caroline Patterson, Eric Heidle, Thomas McGuane, Janet Skeslien Charles, Sidner Larson, Yvonne Seng, James Grady, Jamie Ford, Carrie La Seur, Walter Kirn, Gwen Florio, Debra Magpie Earling, and Keir Graff.
From the introduction by James Grady and Keir Graff:
"This anthology is a road trip through the dreams and disasters of the true Montana, stories written by authors with Montana in their blood, tales that circle you around the state through its cities and small towns. These are twenty-first century authors writing timeless sagas of choice, crime, and consequences...You'll meet students and strippers, cops and cons, druggies and dreamers, cold-eyed killers and caught-in-their-gunsights screwed-up souls.
But mostly, through all our fiction here, you'll meet quiet heroes and see the noir side of life that makes our Montana as real as it is mythic. No doubt the state's beauty will still make the very idea of Montana Noir seem incongruous to some. Noir is black-and-white. Streets and alleys. Flashing neon lighting a rain-streaked window. But while noir was definitely an urban invention, it knows no boundaries. Noir is struggle. It's doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. It's being trapped. It's hubris. It's being defeated yet going on. Sometimes it's being defeated and not going on.
That's life everywhere. This is our Montana."
Product Details
| Publisher | Akashic Books, Ltd. |
| Publish Date | September 05, 2017 |
| Pages | 288 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781617755798 |
| Dimensions | 8.2 X 5.2 X 0.8 inches | 0.6 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
Grit is the best description of the collection of short stories compiled in Montana Noir because every single story has a thick skin of brutality, skeeviness, violence and just a dash of horror that makes the collection exceptionally good . . . An impressive set of works from a variety of writers that deserves to be read by many, especially those who want to lose themselves in the darkness of a Montana winter night.-- "Missoulan"
Terrific . . . Montana Noir is one of the high points in Akashic's long-running and justly celebrated Noir series...Editors Grady and Graff's selections...are all sharply attuned to their settings and to the ways those varying landscapes reflect the darkness within the people who walk the streets or drive the country roads.-- "Booklist"
Thirteen original stories plus a reprint by Thomas McGuane cover the Big Sky State in this thoroughly entertaining Akashic anthology, from desperate writing students in Missoula to a van of itinerant strippers working the Hi-Line paralleling the Canadian border.-- "Publishers Weekly"
What could be a more unlikely breeding ground for noir fiction than Montana, whose wide-open landscapes seem the polar opposite of the mean streets of Los Angeles? Yet certain noir standbys prove both malleable and fertile in these 14 new stories . . . If Montana has a dark side, is anywhere safe from noir?"-- "Kirkus Reviews"
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