Buenos Aires Noir

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: Inés Garland, Ernesto Mallo, Verónica Abdala, Elsa Osorio, Claudia Piñeiro, Pablo De Santis, Inés Fernández Moreno, Alejandro Parisi, Alejandro Soifer, Enzo Maqueira, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Leandro Avalos Blacha, María Inés Krimer, and Ariel Magnus.

Buenos Aires is a city of contrasts and contradictions, always on the edge of chaos, where multimillionaires and the destitute anxiously coexist in close quarters. Here, Argentina's top writers explore a city influenced as much by criminality and smuggling as Borges and the tango.

From the introduction by Ernesto Mallo:

Buenos Aires: city of contrasts, contradictions; always on the edge of chaos; in love with its own disorder despite the crude, transitory violence, the lack of law and order, the ubiquitously hurled insult, the thunderous boom of traffic, honking, hurled curses. Its inhabitants love/hate the city. In the language of the port-dwellers, irony is currency. The multimillionaires of Puerto Madero deal in this irony with as fluently as the workers in the "misery cities," which is what we call the poorest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. This shared language comes from the mansions and the shanties that are built side by side, separate by nothing but a single street or railroad track--contradiction within eyesight...

André Malraux called Buenos Aires the capital of an empire that never existed. This empire, which never existed historically, which was never a conquering force or a military or economic powerhouse, exists in the strength of its literature, born of necessity--born of the precarious nature of its politics and economy--and born of its irreverent capacity to survive.