Taylor M. Polites lives in Providence with his Chihuahua Clovis. His first novel, The Rebel Wife, was published by Simon & Schuster. His work has appeared in Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, as well as Provincetown Arts and the New York Times Disunion blog. He received his MFA from Wilkes University, where he was awarded the Norris Church Mailer Fellowship. He teaches at the Wilkes University MFA program, Roger Williams University, and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Dawn Raffel is the author of four books, most recently The Secret Life of Objects. Her next book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, will be published by Blue Rider Press. She has a degree in semiotics from Brown University.
Luanne Rice is the New York Times best-selling author of thirty-one novels that have been translated into twenty-four languages. The author of The Lemon Orchard, Dream Country, Cloud Nine, and Beach Girls, Rice often writes about love, family, nature, and the sea. She is an avid environmentalist and advocate for families affected by domestic violence. Rice lived in Fox Point in Providence, and now divides her time between New York City and Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Pablo Rodriguez is chair of the Women & Infants Health Care Alliance and a clinical associate professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University. He is a past chairman of the Rhode Island Foundation, the Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island, and the Latino Political Action Committee. He currently hosts a daily call-in radio show on Latino Public Radio.
John Searles is the author of the best-selling novels Help for the Haunted, Strange but True, and Boy Still Missing. His essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. Help for the Haunted won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and was named a Best Crime Novel of 2013 by the Boston Globe and a Top 10 Must Read by Entertainment Weekly. Searles appears frequently on NBC’s Today show to discuss his favorite book selections.
Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge, as well as The Burgess Boys, a New York Times best seller, Abide with Me, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Her short stories have appeared in various publications, including the New Yorker and O, The Oprah Magazine. She lives in New York City.
BONUS MATERIAL
Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series
Also available in the Akashic Noir Series
Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition
INTRODUCTION
WRITERS ON THE RUN
From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple
In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.
It may not have been appropriate, but it sure was noir.
From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.
My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exposure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.