A Conversation with Marva Allen, Regina Brooks, and Marie Brown, Publishers of Open Lens

This week’s installment of Akashic in Good Company features Marva Allen, Regina Brooks, and Marie Brown, co-publishers of Akashic’s Open Lens imprint.

“Sister-in-Law” by Louisa Ermelino (from Staten Island Noir)

Get in the car.

I started to turn but there was a gun in my back or something pretending to be a gun. I faced forward. The voice was familiar, a woman’s voice, a cigarette voice. Philip Morris unfiltered. I think that’s the only way Philip Morris comes. Smoking them was a grand statement, too big for me, but if I was right about the voice then we’d shared a few together, she and I . . .

“How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs” by Natalie Diaz (from The Speed Chronicles)

If he is wearing knives for eyes, if he has dressed for a Day of the Dead parade—three-piece skeleton suit, cummerbund of ribs—his pelvic girdle will look like a Halloween mask.

“The bones,” he’ll complain, make him itch. “Each ulna a tickle.” His mandible might tingle.

He cannot stop scratching, so suggest that he change, but not because he itches—do it for the scratching. Do it for the bones . . .

“Cat in a Box” by Kevin Prufer (from Kansas City Noir)

At last the cat fell asleep and, because Armand still could, he drove his police-issue Crown Vic through the Plaza, down Main Street. He took a left on 47th, slid past Latte Land then Pottery Barn, past Barnes & Noble and Gap Kids, then left again. Three fat men stood outside a fake Irish bar and laughed while the snow came down, but Armand drove right past them too, over the bridge at Wornall and left again, to Ward Parkway then Main then 47th again. Around and around he drove while the cat slept in the cardboard box beside him . . .

“Falconer” by S.J. Rozan

Tuguldur didn’t like the city.

His father had never come, nor his father’s father. Nothing called them. They drove their herds to the ridges, within sight of the distant towers and haze, and sold them to middlemen. They turned their horses when the business was done and rode back to the steppe, to the autumn camps and their families and the young, strong animals that would survive the howling winter and fatten in the spring . . .

“Ghost Town” by Lydia Lunch (from The Heroin Chronicles)

Never answer the door at five forty-five a.m. on a Sunday morning. Either somebody’s too high, somebody has just died, or somebody has just arrived who wants to kill you . . .

Believer Readers Pick Joe Meno’s Office Girl as 2012 Favorite

Office Girl by Joe Meno has been selected by The Believer‘s readers as a favorite fiction release of 2012!

“The White Gyal with the Camera” by Kei Miller (from Kingston Noir)

It was when the papers come out with the gyal’s picture print big and broad on the front page that August Town people did find out her rightful name. Marilyn Fairweather. It sounded right. It sounded like a white woman’s name. But for the six days she had been in August Town we had just called her “the white gyal with the camera.” Or “the white gyal” for short.