Cape Cod Noir (paperback)

Youthful alienation and despair dominate the 13 stories in Akashic's noir volume devoted to Cape Cod. Setting the bleak tone is William Hastings's graphic "Ten-Year Plan," in which an embittered ex-con finds work at DePuzzo's restaurant amid coke sales and rival immigrant groups eager to get back home. In Elyssa East's compelling "Second Chance," a teenage inmate at a reform school is haunted by a fatal car accident. Marred only by an improbable ending, Seth Greenland's "Bad Night in Hyannisport" convincingly portrays a college student's binge-drinking, arrest, and hangover. Paul Tremblay's "Nineteen Snapshots of Dennisport," the most imaginative selection, reveals a tragedy through descriptions of a boy's photo album from a family vacation. Dana Cameron's "Ardent" vividly shows the constraints of being a woman in Puritan times. While unlikely to be featured at the Cape Chamber of Commerce, this volume will satisfy those with a hankering for a taste of the dark side. (June)

Copyright 2011 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

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 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, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He teaches in the low residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Riverside's Palm Desert Graduate Center, and was a visiting professor in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California, Irvine in the spring of 2010. His new book, The Lost Art of Reading, is due out in November.

• Brand-new stories by Paul Tremblay, Seth Greenland, Ben Greenman, Fred Leebron, David L. Ulin, and others.
• Book launch timed to land right before the summer season starts.
• David L. Ulin is very connected in literary circles, being the outgoing editor of the L.A. Times Book Review

"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.