From the Archives: Renowned for her stirring and insightful stories about Haitian life, Edwidge Danticat recently turned her eye to genre as the editor of Haiti Noir, part of Akashic Books’ noir series. The book was published in December, following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Danticat discusses the disaster’s impact on the book and the way that noir captures some of the mystery, darkness and complexity of her homeland.
“If the book strides beyond the noir conventions, as you suggest and certainly I hope, it does so especially to please a couple of ideal readers I had in mind as I wrote it, readers who loved language as much as they ever loved anything….” Charles Lamar Phillips talks with James Whorton, Jr. about his novel Estranged.
“Creatively, music’s biggest impact is attention to sound—mainly rhythm. A sentence always needs a certain number of syllables in it. And my characters have soundtracks.” Steven Wingate talks with Chris Harding Thornton about her debut novel, Pickard County Atlas.
“Stanley’s obsession with the confounding space at the center of himself presents itself as a proper noir MacGuffin.” Michael A. Ferro reviews Joseph Scapellato’s The Made-Up Man, out this month from FSG.
“I like characters that get in a jam and have to weasel their way out, usually with disastrous results”: Lee Matthew Goldberg talks with Vincent Zandri about his new novel, The Mentor, out now from Thomas Dunne Books.
Where do film noir, post-communist Bulgarian fiction, and black comedy intersect? In Vladislav Todorov’s searing noir-meets-social-commentary novel, Zift. Contributing Editor Steven Wingate and Todorov discuss poisonings, the resurgence of narrative fiction in post-communist Eastern Europe, the idea that “many people enjoyed spying on their neighbors” for the state, and much more.
