Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir
anthologies, launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller
Brooklyn Noir. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set
in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective geographic
range of the book. This anthology, with stories set in different prisons
across the US, presents an absolutely new perspective on prison
literature.
From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates: "The blood jet is
poetry--these words of Sylvia Plath have reverberated through my
experience of reading and rereading the stories of Prison Noir. In
this case the blood jet is prose, though sometimes poetic prose; if we
go a little deeper, in some chilling instances, the blood jet is exactly
that: blood. For these stories are not "literary" exercises--though some
are exceptionally well-written by any formalist standards, and artfully
structured as narratives; with a single exception the stories are stark,
somber, emotionally driven cris de coeur... We may feel revulsion for
some of the acts described in these stories, but we are likely to feel a
startled, even stunned sympathy for the perpetrators. And in several
stories, including even murderers' confessions, we are likely to feel a
profound and unsettling identification... There is no need for
fantasy-horror in a place in which matter-of-fact horror is the norm,
and mental illness is epidemic. Vividly rendered realism is the
predominant literary strategy, as in a riveting documentary film."
Featuring brand-new stories by: Christopher M. Stephen, Sin Soracco,
Scott Gutches, Eric Boyd, Ali F. Sareini, Stephen Geez, B.M. Dolarman,
Zeke Caligiuri, Marco Verdoni, Kenneth R. Brydon, Linda Michelle
Marquardt, Andre White, Timothy Pauley, Bryan K. Palmer, and William Van
Poyck.
This audiobook is narrated by Mark Boyett, David Marantz, Joe Barrett,
Christina Delaine, Jennifer Van Dyck, Christian Rummel, Scott Aiello and
Jeff Woodman.
