The nurse pulled onto the outer road parallel to the interstate. The blue friendliness of the St. Luke’s sign radiated faintly in the dawn light as he accelerated before the red admonition of the emergency sign took over his view. He clicked off the malfunctioning turn signal. The morning traffic was light, almost nonexistent. He waited until he had reached forty-five miles an hour to remove his skull-and-bones do-rag, the first phase of his elaborate post-work ritual . . .
Jerry stretched his feet under the dining table, yawning. His eleventh grade math homework seemed to glare at him from the fluorescent white of the overhead light. They were covering probability in class, something Jerry knew plenty about.
To celebrate the release of Singapore Noir, the latest in Akashic’s Noir Series, we’re pleased to bring you this decidedly dark sample from the anthology: editor Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s introduction to “The Sultry City-State.”
Back in 1949, I lived with my grandparents out in the country on a small farm near Richmond, Virginia. Something serious was going on one day as I entered the kitchen at five thirty in the morning. Grandpa and Grandma were standing at the sink, staring so intently out the kitchen window they didn’t even hear me come in . . .
“You need to build your confidence,” he says. “You need to build your self-esteem. You need to build a @better-you. For a @better-us #selfie-rule . . .”
In conjunction with the publication of Pills and Starships by Lydia Millet—the latest release from our Black Sheep imprint for Young Adults and Young Readers—we’ve created the Black Sheep Digit, comprising excerpts from Pills and Starships and our first two Black Sheep releases, Changers Book One: Drew by T Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper and Game World by C. J. Farley.
