Tom Franklin is the author of Poachers: Stories and three novels, Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller, the Willie Morris Prize in Southern Fiction, and the UK's Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel. His latest novel, The Tilted World, was cowritten with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly. They live in Oxford, Mississippi, where they teach in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.
But in Mississippi, darkness falls on both sides of the tracks. And
that's what makes this particular anthology, one of many 'Noirs'
published by Akashic Books, so unnerving. These could be your
neighbors.-- "Sun Herald"
In these stories, from Biloxi to Hattiesburg, from Jackson to
Oxford, the various crimes of the heart or doomed deeds of
fractured households are carried out in real Mississippi locales .
. . [A] devilishly wrought introduction to writers with a feel for
Mississippi who are pursuing lonely, haunting paths of the
imagination.-- "Associated Press"
Maybe it's the oppressive heat and humidity, or maybe it's the high
rates of poverty, crime and corruption that plague this southern
state. Whatever the reason, Mississippi is the perfect setting for
a good noir story . . . [The Noir series] is adept at finding the
dark underbelly of cities big and small, but it has produced a
unique, delicious flavor of noir fiction with this Mississippi
installment.-- "New York Daily News"
Mississippi is the perfect setting for the latest volume in
Akashic's long-running noir series . . . The most memorable pieces
take the definition of noir beyond the expected: William Boyle's
'Most Things Haven't Worked Out' is reminiscent of the gothic
fatalism in Flannery O'Connor's stories, while Michael Kardos's
'Digits, ' about a writing teacher whose students come to class
with fewer and fewer fingers, veers into Shirley Jackson
territory.-- "Library Journal"
Mississippi, as Franklin notes in his introduction, has the most
corrupt government, the highest rate of various preventable ills,
and the highest poverty rate in the country. In short, the state is
a natural backdrop for noir fiction. The 16 stories . . . emerge
from a cauldron of sex, race, ignorance, poverty, bigotry,
misunderstanding, and sheer misfortune.-- "Publishers Weekly"
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