New Jersey Noir Read online

  ALICIA OSTRIKER has published thirteen poetry collections including The Book of Seventy, which received the 2009 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. The Crack in Everything and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1969–1989 were both National Book Award finalists. As a critic, Ostriker has written several books on poetry and on the Bible. She is Professor Emerita of Rutgers University, and teaches in the low-residency poetry MFA program of Drew University.

  ROBERT PINSKY’S Selected Poems was published in 2011. His recent anthology, with accompanying audio CD, is Essential Pleasures. His honors include the Harold Washington Award from the city of Chicago and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his translation of The Inferno of Dante. The videos from his Favorite Poem Project can be viewed at www.favoritepoem.org.

  BILL PRONZINI has been a full-time writer since 1969. He has published seventy-five novels, including four in collaboration with Barry N. Malzberg and thirty-five in his long-running “Nameless Detective” series. Also to his credit are four nonfiction books, and three hundred short stories of which sixty bear the Malzberg/Pronzini byline. Among his numerous awards is the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master, which he received in 2008.

  S.J. ROZAN, author of thirteen crime novels, is an Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity award winner, as well as a recipient of the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award. She’s a lifelong New Yorker, which means she grew up within sight of New Jersey, and specifically Newark. She misspent a shameful amount of her childhood at the late lamented Palisades Amusement Park and is a huge Cory Booker fan. Her latest book is Ghost Hero. For more information, visit www.sjrozan.com.

  JONATHAN SANTLOFER is the author of The Death Artist, Color Blind, The Killing Art, Anatomy of Fear, and The Murder Notebook. He is the recipient of a Nero Wolfe Award, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. He is coeditor, contributor, and illustrator of the anthology The Dark End of the Street, and editor/contributor of L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories. He lives in New York where he is currently at work on a new novel.

  HIRSH SAWHNEY moved to Jersey City in 2009, when he received a fellowship to teach and study writing at Rutgers-Newark University. He is the editor of Delhi Noir, published by Akashic Books, which is being translated into French and Italian. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, and Outlook Traveller. He is working on his first novel.

  GERALD SLOTA’S photographs have been widely exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad. His work is included in collections at the L.A. County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art. His images have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and Art in America. Awards include a MacDowell Artist Residency and Mid-Atlantic Fellowship grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 2001 and 2009. For more information, visit www.geraldslota.com.

  S.A. SOLOMON has published short fiction and poems in the Dos Passos Review, Exquisite Corpse, the New York Quarterly, Lungfull!, and other journals. Her lyrics for Leonid Andreyev’s The One that Gets Slapped, a circus-cabaret-drama, were featured in a 2008 production at Colby College. Her brush with New Jersey noir comes from her years living and working in Jersey City and Newark. She now lives in New York City, and is a freelance writer and editor.

  GERALD STERN, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1925, is the author of fifteen books of poetry including This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award, and a book of personal essays titled What I Can’t Bear Losing. He has won the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award, and his Early Collected: Poems from 1965-1992 was published by W.W. Norton in the spring of 2010.

  EDMUND WHITE has written some twenty-five books—memoirs, biographies, novels, travel books, short stories, and essays. Among his best-known novels are A Boy’s Own Story and The Married Man. He lives in New York but teaches in Princeton, New Jersey.

  C.K. WILLIAMS’S books have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among others. His most recent book of poems, Wait, was published in 2010, as was a prose study, On Whitman, and a children’s book, A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

  Also available from the Akashic Noir Series

  BOSTON NOIR

  edited by Dennis Lehane

  240 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95

  Brand-new stories by: Dennis Lehane, Stewart O’Nan, Patricia Powell, John Dufresne, Lynne Heitman, Don Lee, Russ Aborn, J. Itabari Njeri, Jim Fusilli, Brendan DuBois, and Dana Cameron.

  “In the best of the eleven stories in this outstanding entry in Akashic’s noir series, characters, plot, and setting feed off each other like flames and an arsonist’s accelerant … [T]his anthology shows that noir can thrive where Raymond Chandler has never set foot.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  BROOKLYN NOIR

  edited by Tim McLoughlin

  350 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95

  *Winner of Shamus Award, Anthony Award, Robert L. Fish Memorial Award; finalist for Edgar Award, Pushcart Prize.

  Brand-new stories by: Pete Hamill, Arthur Nersesian, Ellen Miller, Nelson George, Nicole Blackman, Sidney Offit, Ken Bruen, and others.

  “Brooklyn Noir is such a stunningly perfect combination that you can’t believe you haven’t read an anthology like this before. But trust me—you haven’t … The writing is flat-out superb, filled with lines that will sing in your head for a long time to come.”

  —Laura Lippman, winner of the Edgar, Agatha, and Shamus awards

  MANHATTAN NOIR

  edited by Lawrence Block

  264 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95

  Brand-new stories by: Jeffery Deaver, Lawrence Block, Charles Ardai, Carol Lea Benjamin, Thomas H. Cook, Jim Fusilli, John Lutz, Justin Scott, Maan Meyers, Martin Meyers, S.J. Rozan, Xu Xi, and others.

  “A pleasing variety of Manhattan neighborhoods come to life in Block’s solid anthology, the latest entry in Akashic’s city-themed noir series … [T]he writing is of a high order and a nice mix of styles.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  D.C. NOIR

  edited by George Pelecanos

  312 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95

  Brand-new stories by: George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, James Grady, Kenji Jasper, Jim Beane, Ruben Castaneda, Robert Wisdom, Jim Patton, Norman Kelley, Jennifer Howard, Jim Fusilli, and others.

  “[T]he tome offers a startling glimpse into the cityscape’s darkest corners … fans of the genre will find solid writing, palpable tension, and surprise endings.”

  —Washington Post

  LOS ANGELES NOIR

  edited by Denise Hamilton

  360 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95

  *A Los Angeles Times best seller and winner of an Edgar Award.

  Brand-new stories by: Michael Connelly, Janet Fitch, Susan Straight, Héctor Tobar, Patt Morrison, Robert Ferrigno, Neal Pollack, Gary Phillips, Christopher Rice, Naomi Hirahara, Jim Pascoe, and others.

  “Akashic is making an argument about the universality of noir; it’s sort of flattering, really, and Los Angeles Noir, arriving at last, is a kaleidoscopic collection filled with the ethos of noir pioneers Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  BALTIMORE NOIR

  edited by Laura Lippman

  294 pages, trade paperback original, $14.95

  Brand-new stories by: David Simon, Laura Lippman, Tim Cockey, Rob Hiaasen, Robert Ward, Sujata Massey, Dan Fesperman, Marcia Talley, Ben Neihart, Jim Fusilli, Rafael Alvarez, and others.

  “Baltimore is a diverse city, and the stories reflect everything from its old row houses and suburban mansions to its beloved Orioles and harbor areas. Mystery fans should relish this taste of its seamier side.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  These books are ava
ilable at local bookstores.

  They can also be purchased online through www.akashicbooks.com.

  To order by mail send a check or money order to:

  AKASHIC BOOKS

  PO Box 1456, New York, NY 10009

  www.akashicbooks.com, [email protected]

  (Prices include shipping. Outside the U.S., add $12 to each book ordered.)

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  PART I: INNER-CITY NEW JERSEY

  S.A. SOLOMON: Live for Today

  LOU MANFREDO: Soul Anatomy

  S.J. ROZAN: New Day Newark

  C.K. WILLIAMS: Newark Black: 1940–1954

  PART II: ROMANCE & NOSTALGIA

  JONATHAN SANTLOFER: Lola

  BRADFORD MORROW: The Enigma of Grover’s Mill

  GERALD STERN: Broken Glass

  SHEILA KOHLER: Wunderlich

  RICHARD BURGIN: Atlantis

  ALICIA OSTRIKER: August: Feeding Frenzy

  PART III: COMERCE & RETRIBUTION

  HIRSH SAWHNEY: A Bag for Nicholas

  JEFFREY FORD: Glass Eels

  BARRY N. MALZBERG & BILL PRONZINI: Meadowlands Spike

  ROBERT ARELLANO: Kettle Run

  PAUL MULDOON: Noir, NJ

  PART IV: GARDEN STATE UNDERGROUND

  JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: Too Near Real

  EDMUND WHITE & MICHAEL CARROLL: Excavation

  ROBERT PINSKY: Long Branch Underground

  JOYCE CAROL OATES: Run Kiss Daddy

  About the Contributors: