Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books ( http://www.akashicbooks.com/manilanoir.htm ) continues its groundbreaking
series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories,
each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the geographical
area of the book.
Fresh
noir from one of the most intense, congested, and overpopulated cities in the
world.
Original
stories by: Lourd De Veyra, Gina Apostol, Budjette
Tan & Kajo Baldisimo, F.H. Batacan, Jose Dalisay Jr., Eric Gamalinda,
Jessica Hagedorn, Angelo Lacuesta, R. Zamora Linmark, Rosario Cruz-Lucero,
Sabina Murray, Jonas Vitman, Marianne Villanueva, and Lysley Tenorio.
ONE
OF THE MOST POPULOUS cities in the world, Manila provides
the ideal, torrid setting for noir. It's where the rich rub shoulders with the
poor, where five-star hotels coexist with squatter settlements, where religious
zeal coexists with superstition, where "hospitality" might be another
word for prostitution, where politics is often synonymous with celebrity and
corruption, where violence is nothing out of the ordinary and pretty much
anything can be had for a price.
JESSICA
HAGEDORN was born in Manila and now lives in New York. A novelist,
poet, and playwright, her published works include Toxicology, Dream Jungle,
The Gangster Of Love, Danger and Beauty, and Dogeaters, which was a finalist for the
National Book Award in fiction. She also edited both volumes of the
groundbreaking anthology, Charlie Chan Is
Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Visit her
website at www.jessicahagedorn.net
From
the Introduction by Jessica Hagedorn:
Manila
is not for the faint of heart. Built on water and reclaimed land, it’s an
intense, congested, teeming megalopolis, the vital core of an urban network of
sixteen cities and one municipality collectively known as Metro Manila.
Population: over ten million and growing by the minute. Climate: tropical.
Which means hot, humid, prone to torrential monsoon rains of biblical
proportions.
I
think of Manila as the ultimate femme fatale. Complicated and mysterious, with
a tainted, painful past. She’s been invaded, plundered, raped, and pillaged,
colonized for four hundred years by Spain and fifty years by the US, bombed and
pretty much decimated by Japanese and American forces during an epic,
month-long battle in 1945.
Yet
somehow, and with no thanks to the corrupt politicians, the crime syndicates,
and the indifferent rich who rule the roost, Manila bounces back. The people’s
ability to endure, adapt, and forgive never ceases to amaze, whether it’s about
rebuilding from the latest round of catastrophic flooding, or rebuilding from
the ashes of a horrific world war, or the ashes of the brutal, twenty-year
dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos . . .
Many
years have passed since the end of the Marcos dictatorship. People are free to
write and say what they want, yet nothing is different. The poor are still
poor, the rich are still rich, and overseas workers toil in faraway places like
Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, and Finland. Glaring inequities are a source of
dark humor to many Filipinos, but really just another day in the life . . .
Writers
from the Americas and Europe are known for a certain style of noir fiction, but
the rest of the world approaches the crime story from a culturally unique
perspective. In Manila
Noir we find that the genre is
flexible enough to incorporate flamboyant emotion and the supernatural, along
with the usual elements noir fans have come to expect: moody atmospherics,
terse dialogue, sudden violence, mordant humor, a fatalist vision.
Manila Noir
edited by Jessica Hagedorn
published
by Akashic Books
Mystery/Fiction Anthology
A Trade Paperback Original
ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-160-8
e-ISBN: 978-1-61775-176-9
280 pages | $15.95
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