"Youthful alienation and despair dominate the 13 stories in Akashic's noir volume devoted to Cape Cod. [It] will satisfy those with a hankering for a taste of the dark side."
--Publishers Weekly
"A book full of cries in the dark, heavy drinking in the thin gray light of winter, and other dark poses. In other words, the stories sneak in the back screen door of those summer cottages after Labor Day, after all the tourists have gone home and Cape Codders of the authors' imagination drop their masks and their guards. It's a fun read, a little like tracing the shoreline of a not-quite-familiar coast."
--Boston Globe
"David L. Ulin has put together a malicious collection of short stories that will stay with you long after you return home safe."
--The Cult: The Official Chuck Palahniuk Website
Includes brand-new stories by Paul Tremblay, Seth Greenland, Ben Greenman, Fred G. Leebron, David L. Ulin, Dana Cameron, Kaylie Jones, and others.
Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin has been vacationing in Cape Cod every summer since he was a boy. He knows the terrain inside and out; enough to identify the squalid underbelly of this allegedly idyllic location. His editing prowess is a perfect match for this fine volume.
David L. Ulin is book critic of the Los Angeles Times. From 2005 to 2010, he was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and is the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Malice and mayhem simmer beneath the surface of one of America's favorite vacation areas.
"Youthful alienation and despair dominate the 13 stories in Akashic's noir volume devoted to Cape Cod. [It] will satisfy those with a hankering for a taste of the dark side." -
Publishers Weekly
"David L. Ulin has put together a malicious collection of short stories that will stay with you long after you return home safe." -T
he Cult: The Official Chuck Palahniuk Website
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with
Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Brand-new stories by: William Hastings, Elyssa East, Dana Cameron, Paul Tremblay, Adam Mansbach, Seth Greenland, Lizzie Skurnick, David L. Ulin, Kaylie Jones, Fred G. Leebron, Ben Greenman, Dave Zeltserman, and Jedediah Berry.
From the introduction by David L. Ulin:
"Here, we see the inverse of the Cape Cod stereotype, with its sailboats and its presidents. Here, we see the flip side of the Kennedys, of all those preppies in docksiders eating steamers, of the whale watchers and bicycles and kites. Here, we see the Cape beneath the surface, the Cape after the summer people have gone home. It doesn't make the other Cape any less real, but it does suggest a symbiosis, in which our sense of the place can't help but become more complicated, less about vacation living than something more nuanced and profound . . ."
"For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when then summer trade began. There are lines here, lines that get crossed and lines that never get crossed, the kinds of lines that form the web of noir. Call it what you want-summer and smoke is how I think of it-but that's the Cape Cod at the center of this book."
