Description

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Literary crime fiction master Tom Franklin curates this volume of stellar noir from the Deep South.

“A super collection of dark, sultry, gritty Mississippi stories.” —Mississippi Today

“The big city has no lock on misery in these 16 portraits of dark doings in the Deep South.” —Kirkus Reviews

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 geographic area of the book.

Brand-new stories by: Ace Atkins, William Boyle, Megan Abbott, Jack Pendarvis, Dominiqua Dickey, Michael Kardos, Jamie Paige, Jimmy Cajoleas, Chris Offutt, Michael Farris Smith, Andrew Paul, Lee Durkee, Robert Busby, John M. Floyd, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, and Mary Miller.

About the Author

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TOM FRANKLIN is the author of Poachers: Stories and three novels, Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller, the Willie Morris Prize in Southern Fiction, and the UK’s Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel. His latest novel, The Tilted World, was cowritten with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly. They live in Oxford, Mississippi, where they teach in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. He is the editor of Mississippi Noir.

Praise For…

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In these stories, from Biloxi to Hattiesburg, from Jackson to Oxford, the various crimes of the heart or doomed deeds of fractured households are carried out in real Mississippi locales . . . [A] devilishly wrought introduction to writers with a feel for Mississippi who are pursuing lonely, haunting paths of the imagination.
— Associated Press

Mississippi, as Franklin notes in his introduction, has the most corrupt government, the highest rate of various preventable ills, and the highest poverty rate in the country. In short, the state is a natural backdrop for noir fiction. The 16 stories . . . emerge from a cauldron of sex, race, ignorance, poverty, bigotry, misunderstanding, and sheer misfortune.
— Publishers Weekly

Mississippi is the perfect setting for the latest volume in Akashic’s long-running noir series . . . The most memorable pieces take the definition of noir beyond the expected: William Boyle’s ‘Most Things Haven’t Worked Out’ is reminiscent of the gothic fatalism in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, while Michael Kardos’s ‘Digits,’ about a writing teacher whose students come to class with fewer and fewer fingers, veers into Shirley Jackson territory.
— Library Journal

Maybe it’s the oppressive heat and humidity, or maybe it’s the high rates of poverty, crime and corruption that plague this southern state. Whatever the reason, Mississippi is the perfect setting for a good noir story . . . [The Noir series] is adept at finding the dark underbelly of cities big and small, but it has produced a unique, delicious flavor of noir fiction with this Mississippi installment.
— New York Daily News

But in Mississippi, darkness falls on both sides of the tracks. And that’s what makes this particular anthology, one of many ‘Noirs’ published by Akashic Books, so unnerving. These could be your neighbors.
— Sun Herald