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Overview
The more you watch Moscow, the more it looks like a huge chameleon that keeps changing its face—and it isn’t always pretty. Following Akashic Books’ international success with London Noir, Delhi Noir, Paris Noir, and others, the Noir series explores this fabled and troubled city’s darkest recesses.
Features brand-new stories by: Alexander Anuchkin, Igor Zotov, Gleb Shulpyakov, Vladimir Tuchkov, Anna Starobinets, Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, Sergei Samsonov, Alexei Evdokimov, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Maxim Maximov, Irina Denezhkina, Dmitry Kosyrev, Andrei Khusnutdinov, and Sergei Kuznetsov.
Natalia Smirnova was born in 1978 in Moscow. In 2006, together with Julia Goumen, she founded Goumen&Smirnova Literary Agency, representing Russian authors worldwide.
Julia Goumen was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1977. She holds a PhD in English and has worked in publishing since 2001.
Synopsis
Moscow has been chomping at the bit to enter the Noir Series—with the intention of perpetrating extreme Russian menace.
Publishers Weekly
As literary agents Smirnova and Goumen note in their introduction to this excellent entry in Akashic's noir series, “A noir tradition does not yet really exist in Russia.” Still, they have managed to find 14 authors whose dark take on humanity would be familiar to the likes of Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson. Story after story offers haunting images: a husband interrupts his bludgeoning murder of his wife to sing their daughter back to sleep (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's “In the New Development”); a cop eats an apple that fell from the shaven head of a drunken deputy chief detective just shot to death, who'd been playing William Tell (Alexander Anuchkin's “Field of a Thousand Corpses”). In Anna Starobinets's “The Mercy Bus,” a taut tale with a wicked bite, a con man poses as one of Moscow's walking wounded to make his getaway from a charity ball he engineered in order to rip off its patrons. This volume's strength bodes well for a second anthology from these able editors showcasing Russian talents. (June)