Mexico City enters the Noir Series arena, edited by one of Mexico's most revered novelists.

Click here for The Uncomfortable Dead by Paco I. Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos

Click here to see more titles in the Akashic Noir Series.

Launched by the summer '04 award-winning, best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.

"Set across Mexico City in a variety of neighborhoods, the stories feature a cast of characters as diverse as the city, from homeless people to young children to innocent passersby. This is a strong collection, both for the way it showcases outstanding short fiction in the noir style and for the way it demonstrates how a strong sense of place can drive a narrative."
--Booklist

"With volumes devoted to numerous U.S. cities and quite a few foreign capitals, it sometimes seems as if Akashic Books' expanding line of noir story anthologies will wind up covering virtually every major metropolis on earth. [É] The warped humor here, especially in Taibo's contribution about the struggle for the soul of an embattled street corner, is part of the survival mechanism of people who have seen too much of life at its worst but must keep laughing anyway."
--San Francisco Bay Guardian

Brand-new stories by: Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Eugenio Aguirre, Eduardo Antonia Parra, Bernardo Fernandez Bef, Oscar de la Borbolla, Rolo Diez, Victor Luiz Gonzalez, F.G. Haghenbeck, Juan Hernandez Luna, Myriam Laurini, Eduardo Monteverde, and Julia Rodriguez.

It's hard to get much more noir than Mexico City, and after several years' effort, Akashic was finally able to rope Paco I. Taibo into curating this dramatic, chilling, and frequently hilarious volume.

"Twenty-one million residents in the metropolitan area. An infinite city, one of the biggest in the world, a fascinating blanket of lights for those arriving on planes; a huge Christmas tree on its side--red, green, yellow, white; mercury, tungsten, sodium, neon. A city gone crazy with pollution, rain, traffic; an economic crisis that's been going on for twenty-five years. A city famously notable for the strangest reasons: for being the urban counterpoint to the Chiapas jungle; for having the most diverse collection of jokes about death; for setting the record for most political protests in one year; for having two invisible volcanoes and the most corrupt police force on the planet . . .

"Mexico City Noir may not be sponsored by the city's department of tourism, but if anyone, from anywhere on earth, were to ask whether the writers recommend visiting Mexico City, the response would be both firm and passionate: 'Yes, of course.' Because this is the best city on the planet, in spite of itself."
--From the introduction.

Paco I. Taibo II was born in Gijon, Spain and has lived in Mexico since 1958. He is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, which have been published in many languages around the world, including a mystery series starring Mexican Private Investigator Hector Belascoaran Shayne. He is a professor of history at the Metropolitan University of Mexico City.