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Moscow Noir (Russia)

Edited by: Natalia Smirnova and Julia Goumen

Moscow has been chomping at the bit to enter the Noir Series . . . This anthology fearlessly investigates the darkest recesses of this fabled and troubled metropolis.

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What people are saying…

“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.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Description

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: 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.

From the introduction by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen:

“The center of a sprawling state for nearly its entire history, Moscow has attracted diverse communities, who have come to the city in search of better lives—to work, mainly, but also to beg, to glean scraps from the tables of hard-nosed merchants, to steal and rob. The concentration of capital allowed people to tear down and rebuild ad infinitum; new structures were erected literally on the foundations of the old. Before the 1917 Revolution, buildings demolished and resurrected many times over created a favorable environment for all manner of criminal and quasi-criminal elements. After the Revolution, the ideology did not simply encourage destruction but demanded it. The Bolshevik anthem has long defined the public mentality: ‘We will raze this world of violence to its foundations, and then/ We will build our new world: he who was nothing will become everything! . . .”

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Crime and Punishment
“The Mercy Bus” by Anna Starobinets (Kursk Station)
“Gold and Heroin” by Vyacheslav Kuritsyn (Leningradsky Avenue)
“In the New Development” by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Prazhskaya)
“Wait” by Andrei Khusnutdinov (Babushkinskaya)

Part II: Dead Souls
“Field of a Thousand Corpses” by Alexander Anuchkin (Elk Island)
“Pure Ponds, Dirty Sex, or Two Army Buddies Meet” by Vladimir Tuchkov (Pure Ponds)
“Decameron” by Igor Zotov (Silver Pine Forest)
“The Doppelgänger” by Gleb Shulpyakov (Zamoskvorechye)

Part III: Fathers and Sons
“Daddy Loves Me” by Maxim Maximov (Perovo)
“Christmas” by Irina Denezhkina (New Arbat)
“The Point of No Return” by Sergei Samsonov (Ostankino)

Part IV: War and Peace
“The Coat that Smelled like Earth” by Dmitry Kosyrev (Master Chen) (Birch Grove Park)
“Europe after the Rain” by Alexei Evdokimov (Kiev Station)
“Moscow Reincarnations” by Sergei Kuznetsov (Lubyanka)

Book Details

Paperback: 280 pages
Published: 6/1/10
IBSN: 9781936070060
e-IBSN: 9781936070817

Genre: Fiction

Authors

NATALIA SMIRNOVA was born in 1978 in Moscow. In 2006 she cofounded the Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency with Julia Goumen, representing Russian authors worldwide. She and Goumen coedited both Moscow Noir and St. Petersburg Noir.

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JULIA GOUMEN was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1977, and has a PhD in English. She has been working in publishing since 2001, and since 2006 has run the Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency with Natalia Smirnova, with whom she coedited Moscow Noir and St. Petersburg Noir.