Paris Noir
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Overview
"The dank and sweaty crime scenes in Paris Noir…testify to the fact that the French invented “noir.” Among the jarring images in this story collection, Didier Daeninckx’s murky view of the after-hours scene in Porte Saint-Denis and Marc Villard’s gritty look at the sex trade in Les Halles are correctives to all those persistent romantic fantasies about the city.”—New York Times
Paris Noir takes you on a ride through the old medieval center of town with its winding streets, its ghosts, and its secrets buried in history. This is more than an homage to the crime genre, to Melville and Godard, it’s also a lush introduction to the very best in French fiction.
Brand-new stories from: Marc Villard, Didier Daeninckx, Jean-Bernard Pouy, Salim Bachi, Christophe Mercier, Jerome Leroy, DOA, Laurent Martin, Herve Prudon, Patrick Pecherot, Dominique Mainard, and Chantal Pelletier.
Aurélien Masson is the director of la Série Noire at Gallimard, one of France’s leading publishing companies.
Synopsis
All original stories from Paris' finest authors, all translated from French.
The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio
The dank and sweaty crime scenes in Paris Noir testify to the fact that the French invented "noir."
Editorials
Marilyn Stasio
The dank and sweaty crime scenes in Paris Noir testify to the fact that the French invented "noir."—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Rarely has the City of Light seemed grittier than in this hard-boiled short story anthology, part of Akashic's noir series that began in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. The 12 freshly penned pulp fictions by some of France's most prominent practitioners play out in a kind of darker, parallel universe to the tourist mecca; visitors cross these pages at their peril, like the hapless hunk taken captive in Chantal Pelletier's kinky "The Chinese Guy." As is usual for such volumes, the quality varies considerably among the selections made by Masson, young editor of Gallimard's Série Noire, but it's worth fast-forwarding through the few duds for direct hits like Christophe Mercier's "Christmas," the poignant tale of a pair of doomed lovers on a snowy night in Pigalle, or Dominique Mainard's "La Vie en Rose," in which a Piaf-worthy tragedy unfolds amid her old haunts in Belleville. Bull's-eye. (Nov.)
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