Buenos Aires Noir
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Short stories featuring "crimes of passion, politics, and perversity," set in this tumultuous South American city (Publishers Weekly).
It is a city of contradictions and chaos; crude, transitory violence, the lack of law and order, the ubiquitously hurled insult, the thunderous boom of traffic, and honking curses. Its inhabitants love the city and hate it—from the multimillionaires of Puerto Madero to the workers in the "misery cities," the poorest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. Often the mansions are separated from the shanties by nothing but a single street or railroad track.
These short stories of crime and corruption from a lineup of excellent authors highlights the relations between the social and economic classes—their tensions, their cruelties, and also their love—in a city that has reinvented itself many times over.
Brand-new stories by Inés Garland, Inés Fernández Moreno, Ariel Magnus, Alejandro Parisi, Pablo De Santis, Verónica Abdala, Alejandro Soifer, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Ernesto Mallo, Enzo Maqueira, Elsa Osorio, Leandro Ávalos Blacha, Claudia Piñeiro, and María Inés Krimer.
"As editor Mallo says, Buenos Aires is a city 'in love with its own disorder' . . . . Murder most foul, the star attraction of almost any good noir, makes several appearances here . . . .Mallo's well-balanced collection gives readers a glimpse of both the geography of Buenos Aires and its heart." —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crimes of passion, politics, and perversity pervade the 14 selections in Akashic's noir volume devoted to Buenos Aires, where the grim past of the dirty war and present tumult provide a rich backdrop. From the mannered, gothic homage to Edgar Allan Poe in In s Fern ndez Moreno's "Crochet" to the hyperkinetic prose of a coked-up bomb maker in Gabriela Cabez n C mara's "The Golden Eleventh," the styles are as varied as the Argentine capital's neighborhoods. Alejandro Soifer's gritty "Chameleon and the Lions" stands out as a model of hardboiled detective work, with a couple of grim twists. Alejandro Parisi's taut, unsettling "Fury of the Worm" describes the grim doings of the city's sordid, vicious criminal gangs. Leandro valos Blancha's "The Excluded," which ends in the famed Recoleta cemetery, touches on the complex, uneasy mingling of social classes, races, and professional castes. Literary visitors may want to seek out longer looks after these brief exposures to the city's many layers.
