Atlanta Noir

by Tayari Jones (Editor)

Overview

Georgia Center for the Book has chosen Atlanta Noir as one of 2018's Books All Georgians Should Read!

Kenji Jasper's "A Moment of Clarity at the Waffle House" nominated for a 2018 Edgar Award for Best Short Story!

"Atlanta has its share, maybe more than its share, of prosperity. But wealth is no safeguard against peril...Creepy as well as dark, grim in outlook...Hints of the supernatural may make these tales...appealing to lovers of ghost stories."
--Kirkus Reviews

"These stories, most of them by relative unknowns, offer plenty of human interest...All the tales have a Southern feel."
--Publishers Weekly

"Jones, author of Leaving Atlanta, returns to the South via Akashic's ever-growing city anthology series. The collection features stories from an impressive roster of talent including Jim Grimsley, Sheri Joseph, Gillian Royes, Anthony Grooms and David James Poissant. The 14 selections each take place in different Atlanta neighborhood."
--Atlanta-Journal Constitution

"Now comes Atlanta Noir, an anthology that masterfully blends a chorus of voices, both familiar and new, from every corner of Atlanta...The magic of Atlanta Noir is readily apparent, starting with the introduction Jones pens. It doesn’t rest solely upon the breadth of writers but on how their words, stories and references are so Atlanta--so very particular, so very familiar and so very readily, for those who know the city, nostalgic. And for those who don’t? The sense of place it captures inspires a desire to get to know Atlanta and its stories."
--ArtsATL

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. This much-anticipated and long-overdue installment in Akashic's Noir Series reveals many sides of Atlanta known only to its residents.

Brand-new stories by: Tananarive Due, Kenji Jasper, Tayari Jones, Dallas Hudgens, Jim Grimsley, Brandon Massey, Jennifer Harlow, Sheri Joseph, Alesia Parker, Gillian Royes, Anthony Grooms, John Holman, Daniel Black, and David James Poissant.

From the introduction by Tayari Jones:

Atlanta itself is a crime scene. After all, Georgia was founded as a de facto penal colony and in 1864, Sherman burned the city to the ground. We might argue about whether the arson was the crime or the response to the crime, but this is indisputable: Atlanta is a city sewn from the ashes and everything that grows here is at once fertilized and corrupted by the past...

These stories do not necessarily conform to the traditional expectations of noir...However, they all share the quality of exposing the rot underneath the scent of magnolia and pine. Noir, in my opinion, is more a question of tone than content. The moral universe of the story is as significant as the physical space. Noir is a realm where the good guys seldom win; perhaps they hardly exist at all. Few bad deeds go unrewarded, and good intentions are not the road to hell, but are hell itself...Welcome to Atlanta Noir. Come sit on the veranda, or the terrace of a high-rise condo. Pour yourself a glass of sweet tea, and fortify it with a slug of bourbon. Put your feet up. Enjoy these stories, and watch your back.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617755590
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	07/25/2017
Series:	Akashic Noir Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Tayari Jones was born and raised in southwest Atlanta. A graduate of Spelman College, she is the author of three novels, including Silver Sparrow, an NEA Big Read selection. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Radcliffe Insitute for Advanced Study, and the United States Artist Foundation. She is on the MFA faculty at Rutgers-Newark University.

Daniel Black is professor of African American Studies at Clark Atlanta University. He is also the author of several novels, including They Tell Me of a Home, Perfect Peace, The Coming, and Listen to the Lambs. Alice Walker said, “Perfect Peace is a spellbinding novel that kept me reading late into several nights . . . It is a gift to have so much passion, so much love, so much beautiful writing so flawlessly faithful to the language of ancestors . . .”
Tananarive Due’s short story collection Ghost Summer won a British Fantasy Award in 2016. The novelist and screenwriter has also won an American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award. She lives in the Los Angeles area, but she spent three years in Atlanta while her mother was ill, where she served as a distinguished visiting scholar at Spelman College. During that time, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
Jim Grimsley has lived in Atlanta for over thirty years, having debuted his first play in the city in 1983. He is the author of a dozen books, including Winter Birds and Dream Boy. In 2005 he was awarded the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Emory University.
Anthony Grooms has lived in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood for nearly thirty years. When he isn’t teaching, he writes novels in his spider-ridden cellar. His novel Bombingham, set during the Birmingham civil rights movement, won both a Lillian Smith Book Award and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His novel The Vain Conversation, about redemption for race crimes, will be published in 2018. For more information, go to anthonygrooms.com.
Jennifer Harlow earned a BA in psychology from the University of Virginia. She has worked as a bookseller, radio deejay, lab assistant, and government investigator. She is the author of the F.R.E.A.K.S. Squad Investigation series, the Galilee Falls Trilogy, and the Iris Ballard series. She lives in Atlanta and is hard at work on her next book.
John Holman is the author of Triangle Ray, Luminous Mysteries, and Squabble and Other Stories. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Mississippi Review, and Oxford American, along with other journals and several anthologies. He is a Whiting Award recipient, and has taught at Georgia State University in Atlanta since 1993.
Dallas Hudgens is a native of Atlanta and a graduate of Duluth High School and Georgia State University. He is the author of the novels Drive Like Hell and Season of Gene and the short story collection Wake Up, We’re Here. He is the founder of Relegation Books, a small press based in Washington, DC.
Kenji Jasper wrote the best-selling novel Dark in Atlanta just after finishing his degree at Morehouse College. His articles for Creative Loafing, Upscale, and Rappages helped to take the careers of groups like Outkast, Goodie Mob, and Arrested Development national. His novel Cake, written under the pseudonym D, takes place on his college stomping grounds. Jasper’s next novel, Nostrand Avenue, will be published by Kensington Books in 2018. He lives in Los Angeles.
Sheri Joseph is the author of two novels, Where You Can Find Me and Stray, and a cycle of stories, Bear Me Safely Over. She has been awarded an NEA fellowship and the Grub Street National Book Prize in fiction, as well as numerous residency fellowships including MacDowell and Yaddo. She lives in Atlanta, where she teaches in the creative writing program at Georgia State University and serves as fiction editor of Five Points.
Brandon Massey has lived in Atlanta since 1999. He is the author of several novels, including Dark Corner, The Other Brother, and Don’t Ever Tell. Visit www.brandonmassey.com for the latest news on his publications.
Alesia Parker, a native Atlantan, is a happy chemist by day and closeted writer by night. She has honed her craft through various writing workshops in the Atlanta area over the past decade. Her story in this volume, “Ma’am,” is excerpted from her manuscript-in-progress, Always Watching. This is her first published story.
David James Poissant is the author of The Heaven of Animals: Stories and winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a Florida Book Award. He was long-listed for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Glimmer Train, the New York Times, Playboy, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review. He grew up in Gwinnett County, Georgia.
Gillian Royes was born in Jamaica and furthered her education in the United States, completing a doctorate in communications at Emory University, where she initiated her love affair with Atlanta. She is the author of the cozy mystery novels in the Shadrack Myers series published by Simon&Schuster, and her film script Preciosa was recently shot in St. Croix. She is currently working on a film adaptation of her novel The Man Who Turned Both Cheeks.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Underneath the Scent of Magnolia and Pine

Atlanta, the "city too busy to hate," may be the noirest town in the nation. When I say "noir" I don't mean that we are the murder capital, nor do we strive to be. We are the ninth-largest city in the United States. Our airport is the busiest on earth, hosting over 100 million passengers in recent calendar years. (It is said that even on your way to heaven, you must change planes at Hartsfield-Jackson.) An entire school of hip-hop was born here too. But it is not our urbanity alone that makes us noir. We are a Southern city. Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind both in and about Atlanta. Martin Luther King's Ebeneezer still stands proud on the northeast side of town. Just after the Civil War, six colleges were founded to lift the recently emancipated, and these institutions promote black (Southern) excellence to this day.

Atlanta is rife with contradictions. Priding ourselves on not putting all our business in the street, we shelter secrets for generations. At the same time, we have somehow managed to become a reality television hub. TV personality Todd Chrisley serves up his own brand of "bless your heart" backhandedness and family dysfunction for millions of viewers all over the country, yet gossip magazines hint at a scandal hidden in full view. Most of the "Real" Housewives of Atlanta are not even from Atlanta, nor are they housewives, but they have taken our hometown as their own — and housewifery is a state of mind, not a marital status. These ladies fight at baby showers, marry with the cameras rolling, and divorce in the same fashion. T.I. and Tiny of The Family Hustle are ATLiens for sure, and they allow us to be spectators as they negotiate what it means to be recently rich, famous, and black. Kim Zolciak used to be a Real Housewife of Atlanta, sharing the most intimate details of her love life, but drawing the line at being filmed without her blond wig. After the racial tensions on set bubbled over, she moved to her own show, the programming equivalent of white flight — and actually became a housewife.

Atlanta Noir is not a citified version of Southern Gothic. These authors delve deep into the grotesquerie that is embedded in every narrative and character. When we write noir, we don't shine a light into darkness, we lower the shades. There are no secrets like Southern secrets and no lies like Southern lies.

Keep in mind that there are those who still speak of the Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression," perhaps the biggest lie of all. Bronze markers dot the landscape, lamenting the loss, never allowing the past to pass. Yet, in the early 1980s, a serial killer terrorized the city for two years, murdering at least twenty-eight African American children, but this recent history has been put to bed. No memorial stands in honor of the fallen. No one has forgotten, but nobody talks about it, because this is Atlanta and this is how we do things.

This city itself is a crime scene. After all, Georgia was founded as a de facto penal colony and in 1864, Sherman burned the city to the ground. We might argue about whether the arson was the crime or the response to the crime, but this is indisputable: Atlanta is a city sewn from the ashes and everything that grows here is at once fertilized and corrupted by the past.

*
In this anthology, I am excited to share fourteen writers' take on the B-side of the ATL. These stories do not necessarily conform to the traditional expectations of noir as several of them are not, by any stretch, crime fiction. However, they all share the quality of exposing the rot underneath the scent of magnolia and pine. Noir, in my opinion, is more a question of tone than content. The moral universe of the story is as significant as the physical space. Noir is a realm where the good guys seldom win; perhaps they hardly exist at all. Few bad deeds go unrewarded, and good intentions are not the road to hell, but are hell itself.

They call it the "Dirty South" for a reason. Here, Waffle House is more than a marker of Southern charm and cholesterol. Yes, the hash browns are scattered, smothered, and chunked, but narcotics, sex, and cash are available, if not on the menu. Just on the outskirts of the East Lake Golf Club is a neighborhood that is not mentioned on the real estate brochures. Perhaps it's true that servants are just like family, but this is not necessarily an upgrade. Megachurches may save you from sin, but not from the wrath of the past.

That said, this book also engages noir in the old-fashioned sense of the word, hard-boiled and criminal. Judges put hits on citizens, crazy neighbors turn out to be homicidal — and victims of homicide. Drug dealers double-cross each other, and sometimes sweet little girls murder just for the hell of it.

But don't forget that this is the Peach State, and down here, we like to take our poison with a side of humor. Behind every murder, under every drug deal, beneath each church pew, and tucked into the working girls' purses is a moment of the absurd and a laugh to be had at the expense of those who can't handle the truth.

Welcome to Atlanta Noir. Come sit on the veranda, or the terrace of a high-rise condo. Pour yourself a glass of sweet tea, and fortify it with a slug of bourbon. Put your feet up. Enjoy these stories, and watch your back.

Tayari Jones May 2017

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Atlanta Noir"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Akashic Books.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: The Devil Went Down to Georgia

“Snowbound” by Tananarive Due (Buckhead)

“Terceira” by Dallas Hudgens (College Park)

“The Prisoner” by Brandon Massey (Grant Park)

“Kill Joy” by Sheri Joseph (East Atlanta)

“One-Eyed Woman” by Gillian Royes (Virginia-Highland)

Part II: Kin Folks&Skin Folks

“Selah” by Anthony Grooms (Inman Park)

“Caramel” by Tayari Jones (Cascade Heights)

“Comet” by David James Poissant (Stone Mountain)

“Come Ye, Disconsolate” by Daniel Black (Mechanicsville)

Part III: Nose Wide Open

“The Bubble” by Jennifer Harlow (Peachtree City)

“A Moment of Clarity at the Waffle House” by Kenji Jasper (Vinings)

“Four in the Morning in the New Place” by Jim Grimsley (Little Five Points)

“Ma’am” by Alesia Parker (Midtown)

“The Fuck Out” by John Holman (East Lake Terrace)

Editorial Reviews

06/05/2017
In the introduction to the Atlanta volume in Akashic’s groundbreaking noir series, Jones admits that several of the 14 entries “are not, by any stretch, crime fiction.” Still, these stories, most of them by relative unknowns, offer plenty of human interest. David James Poissant’s “Comet” effectively uses Stone Mountain as the setting for a boy and his father’s climb to see Halley’s Comet. In Brandon Masey’s “The Prisoner,” a parolee finds staying clean comes at a very heavy price. The plight of the homeless and the shortcomings of shelters are poignantly explored in Anthony Grooms’s “Selah.” In Jennifer Harlow’s unsettling “The Bubble,” two rich, bored high school girls plan a thrill murder that will bind them forever. A mentally disturbed neighbor’s actions become more and more troublesome for an out-of-work school teacher in Sheri Joseph’s edgy “Kill Joy.” Oddly, while all the tales have a Southern feel, none evokes Atlanta’s past, such as the Civil War period. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Atlanta is one of America’s most dynamic and fastest growing cities, with an increasingly diverse population. This volume honors the city’s transformation—albeit in a chilling manner—with a highly talented crew of 14 respected contributors who know the city inside and out, from its souls to its heart . . . Once again, Akashic shows us why it is king of noir and especially anthologies with such high-quality writers and storytellers. We’ve waited long for this beautiful collection of all things dark and murderous, but the wait was well worth it. Atlanta Noir could well turn out to be Akashic’s best work to date."

New York Journal of Books

"The stories in Atlanta Noir are connected, as Jones suggests in her introduction . . . In particular, the ‘rot’ these narratives expose are specifically Atlanta versions of gentrification, the suburbs, traffic, and inequality. At their best, the stories reveal and complicate a post–civil rights, but far from post-racial, Atlanta . . . This collection is noteworthy in terms of its multiple contemporary literary representations of our city, particularly considering the general lack of them otherwise."

Atlanta Studies

"Now comes Atlanta Noir, an anthology that masterfully blends a chorus of voices, both familiar and new, from every corner of Atlanta . . . The magic of Atlanta Noir is readily apparent, starting with the introduction Jones pens. It doesn’t rest solely upon the breadth of writers but on how their words, stories and references are so Atlanta—so very particular, so very familiar and so very readily, for those who know the city, nostalgic. And for those who don’t? The sense of place it captures inspires a desire to get to know Atlanta and its stories."

ArtsATL

"Akashic Books has published more than 50 volumes of its 'Noir' anthologies, each set in a different city, from Manhattan to Manila. This month welcomes the release of Atlanta Noir, a collection of 14 short stories by mostly Southern writers, including locals Jim Grimsley and John Holman. Another notable contributor: the book’s editor, award-winning novelist and Spelman alum Tayari Jones. She calls Atlanta—with its gentility, urban grit, and history that ranges from stirring to grotesque—'the noirest town in the nation.'"
—Atlanta Magazine, Top Atlanta Event pick for August

"The book holds 14 chilling tales of urban grit and moral ambiguity, each one written by an author with an intimate knowledge of the city and edited by Jones, whose own writing appears in the collection...The range of stories provided in the collection provides an almost perfect snapshot of the city in which we live, written by people who know it best."
—Creative Loafing

"Atlanta is one of America's most dynamic and fastest growing cities, with an increasingly diverse population. This volume honors the city's transformation—albeit in a chilling manner—with a highly talented crew of 14 respected contributors who know the city inside and out, from its souls to its heart...Once again, Akashic shows us why it is king of noir and especially anthologies with such high-quality writers and storytellers. We've waited long for this beautiful collection of all things dark and murderous, but the wait was well worth it. Atlanta Noir could well turn out to be Akashic's best work to date."
—New York Journal of Books"

From the Publisher

2017-06-20
The 14 new stories Jones (Silver Sparrow, 2011, etc.) gathers seek to expose "the rot underneath the scent of magnolia and pine" in thoroughly modern but oh-so-Southern Atlanta.Atlanta has its share, maybe more than its share, of prosperity. But wealth is no safeguard against peril. A Hollywood transplant finds that a mansion in Buckhead is far from a safe haven in Tananarive Due's "Snowbound." Neither is a high-rise condo next to Phipps Plaza in Kenji Jasper's "A Moment of Clarity at the Waffle House." Being married to a city councilman doesn't guarantee happiness in Alesia Parker's "Ma'am." And Jennifer Harlow's baby-faced killers reveal the evil that lurks even in serene, suburban Peachtree City in "The Bubble." Poverty, on the other hand, is a surefire path to misery. No one knows that better than the Jamaican transplant whose life in the United States has been a steady path downward in Gillian Royes' "One-Eyed Woman." Working in a no-tell motel is no bed of roses, as editor Jones demonstrates in "Caramel." Nor is selling beer in your backyard a path to glory in John Holman's "The Fuck Out." Social service agencies offer no help to the downtrodden in Anthony Grooms' "Selah." And turning a new leaf after your release from prison is a waste of time for the soiled hero of Brandon Massey's "The Prisoner." Better to seek salvation on the corner of McDaniel and Abernathy streets, like the hero of Daniel Black's "Come Ye, Disconsolate." Creepy as well as dark, grim in outlook, and murky of prose. Hints of the supernatural may make these tales more appealing to lovers of ghost stories than to the hard-boiled crowd.

Kirkus Reviews