News & Features » July 2015 » Chicago Noir: The Classics Receives STARRED Review from Publishers Weekly!

Chicago Noir: The Classics Receives STARRED Review from Publishers Weekly!

We’re thrilled to share that Chicago Noir: The Classics — the latest addition to Akashic’s award-winning Noir Series, edited by best-selling author Joe Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned, The Boy Detective Fails) — has received a STARRED review from Publishers Weekly! Click here or see below to read the full review:

★ In this superior entry in Akashic’s noir series, Meno (Office Girl) offers nearly a century of Chicago crime fiction, starting with Harry Stephen Keeler’s sprightly “30 Seconds of Darkness,” originally published in 1916. Hugh Holton’s “The Thirteenth Amendment,” one of the newer stories out of the fifteen included, is a work of satirical science fiction set in the future America of President Newt Gingrich. Familiar bylines abound: Max Allan Collins, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Anderson, Fredric Brown, Patricia Highsmith (with an excerpt from her novel The Price of Salt), Stewart M. Kaminsky, Sara Paretsky. Others may be less familiar to mystery specialists, but all turn in impressive performances. If one selection rises above the anthology’s consistently high level, it would be Kaminsky’s “Blue Note,” a high-tension tale that merges a love for the blues with the psychology of high-stakes poker, a character study, and a surprising ending.

Chicago Noir: The Classics will be simultaneously released on September 1st with Joe Meno’s latest novel, Marvel and a Wonder, which also received a glowing review in the July 13th issue of Publishers Weekly, who declared the book “a compelling mash-up of magic and the absurd with the grittiness of a world inhabited by punks, thieves, and losers” and went on to call it “a provocative reflection on the lives of the disenfranchised in the waning days of the twentieth century, with a bittersweet resolution that will resonate with readers.” Click here to read the full review.

Congratulations, Joe!

Posted: Jul 17, 2015

Category: News | Tags: Akashic Insider, book review, Chicago, Chicago Noir: The Classics, Hairstyles of the Damned, Joe Meno, Marvel and a Wonder, News, Noir, Noir Series, Office Girl, Publishers Weekly, Review, reviews, starred review, The Boy Detective Fails