Chicago Noir

by Bayo Ojikutu, Todd Dills, Neal Pollack, et al.

Book Overview

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.Brand-new stories by: Neal Pollack, Achy Obejas, Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, Adam Langer, Joe Meno, Peter Orner, Kevin Guilfoile, Bayo Ojikutu, Jeffery Renard Allen, Luciano Guerriero, Claire Zulkey, Andrew Ervin, M.K. Meyers, Todd Dills, C.J. Sullivan, Daniel Buckman, Amy Sayre-Roberts, and Jim Arndorfer.From the introduction by Neal Pollack: "Chicago's literature has rarely concerned itself with the vagaries of the upper and upper-middle classes. The city's best writers-Nelson Algren, James Farrell, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, and so on-have traditionally used working people as their palette. They accurately captured the rough streets and random cruelty of urban life, but for people living in Chicago, their stories meant something more. They shaped the way Chicagoans think about themselves, and about Chicago.The excellent new stories I've collected in this volume try to fill the gap between how the world sees Chicago and how Chicago sees itself. Many of the stories take nostalgia as a theme. Some have a yellowing snapshot feel, as though they're trying to archive a city that's just about gone. Adam Langer looks wistfully back at neighborhood life in the 1970s. C.J. Sullivan's protagonist, long past whatever sad prime he once had, also remembers the '70s as a golden age. Peter Orner drifts even further back, to the 1950s, while inhabiting the mind of one of Chicago's most sinister criminals, and Claire Zulkey visits the city 100 years ago, when people were strange and their crimes even stranger. Now that was a city worth writing about."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1888451890
• ISBN13: 9781888451894
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Burn, Baby, Burn

This much is clear: Akashic Books is on a roll. With the publishing of their fourth anthology of Noir tales, the publishing house is quickly securing their reputation as having a good eye for both desired topics and authors to supply that demand. How else does one explain the amazing stories collected in Chicago Noir, a book that is less about Chicago as it is about writers who are in tune with the art of true storytelling. Chicago Noir follows the tradition of Akashic Books' Brooklyn Noir and San Francisco Noir in offering tales of shady characters, double dealings, gun molls and violent deaths in and around one select city or location; this time Chicago. But while not all of the tales have a Chicago flavor even in the least bit, the stories themselves do manage to live up to the flavor of noir. [...]Bayo Ojikutu's The Gospel of Moral Ends, while well intentioned, belongs in another book altogether, which is to say that overall Chicago Noir burns as hot and brilliant as the Chicago Fire-even if editor Neal Pollack, who does a fantastic job here as editor, no longer lives in the Windy City.

A fresh look at noir

I enjoyed Chicago Noir quite a bit. Its broad array of authors offer a refreshing take on the well-worn noir genre. While there's still plenty of moral ambiguities, cliffhanger plot twists and sudden acts of senseless violence to please the most devoted fans of traditional noir, the writers come up with some interesting new angles. A very enjoyable effort overall.

New Spin on Old Form

I think CHICAGO NOIR tries to redefine what noir might mean in 2005, and does a fine job avoiding the hard-boiled cliches of the 1930's. The short fiction is well written and takes the reader into many places that might not be considered tradionally noir. I think the above reviewer, Jerry Saperstein, needs to lighten up and let modernity flow. His president is certainly having a hard time with that himself.