Urban Noir

This collection of essays examines how New York and Los Angeles are depicted in noir and neo-noir films from the 1940s through the 21st century. These essays consider how the architectural sights and city sounds inform such films as Cotton Comes to Harlem, Drive, Kiss of Death, Naked City, and Nightcrawler, among others.

An authoritative companion that offers a wide-ranging thematic survey of this enduringly popular cultural form and includes scholarship from both established and emerging scholars as well as analysis of film noir's influence on other media including television and graphic novels. Covers a wealth of new approaches to film noir and neo-noir that explore issues ranging from conceptualization to cross-media influences Features chapters exploring the wider ‘noir mediascape’ of television, graphic novels and radio Reflects the historical and geographical reach of film noir, from the 1920s to the present and in a variety of national cinemas Includes contributions from both established and emerging scholars

From the award-winning author of Gil's All Fright Diner comes a fantastic sci-fi mystery read The Automatic Detective Even in Empire City, a town where weird science is the hope for tomorrow, it's hard for a robot to make his way. It's even harder for a robot named Mack Megaton, a hulking machine designed to bring mankind to its knees. But Mack's not interested in world domination. He's just a bot trying to get by, trying to demonstrate that he isn't just an automated smashing machine, and to earn his citizenship in the process. It should be as easy as crushing a tank for Mack, but some bots just can't catch a break. When Mack's neighbors are kidnapped, Mack sets off on a journey through the dark alleys and gleaming skyscrapers of Empire City. Along the way, he runs afoul of a talking gorilla, a brainy dame, a mutant lowlife, a little green mob boss, and the secret conspiracy at the heart of Empire's founders---not to mention more trouble than he bargained for. What started out as one missing family becomes a battle for the future of Empire and every citizen that calls her home. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

From one of our finest cultural historians, The Noir Forties is a vivid reexamination of America's postwar period, that "age of anxiety" characterized by the dissipation of victory dreams, the onset of the Red Scare, and a nascent resistance to the growing Cold War consensus. Richard Lingeman examines a brief but momentous and crowded time, the years between VJ Day and the beginning of the Korean War, describing how we got from there to here. It evokes the social and cultural milieu of the late forties, with the vicissitudes of the New Deal Left and Popular Front culture from the end of one hot war and the beginning of the cold one -- and, longer term, of a cold war that preoccupied the United States for the next fifty years. It traces the attitudes, sentiments, hopes and fears, prejudices, behavior, and collective dreams and nightmares of the times, as reflected in the media, popular culture, political movements, opinion polls, and sociological and psychological studies of mass beliefs and behavior.

Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir as defined by negative affect. This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time period or national tradition. Instead, the essays in Noir Affect trace noir’s negativity as it manifests in different national contexts from the United States to Mexico, France, and Japan and in a range of different media, including films, novels, video games, and manga. The forms of affect associated with noir are resolutely negative: These are narratives centered on loss, sadness, rage, shame, guilt, regret, anxiety, humiliation, resentment, resistance, and refusal. Moreover, noir often asks us to identify with those on the losing end of cultural narratives, especially the criminal, the lost, the compromised, the haunted, the unlucky, the cast-aside, and the erotically “perverse,” including those whose greatest erotic attachment is to death. Drawing on contemporary work in affect theory, while also re-orienting some of its core assumptions to address the resolutely negative affects narrated by noir, Noir Affect is invested in thinking through the material, bodily, social, and political–economic impact of the various forms noir affect takes. If much affect theory asks us to consider affect as a space of possibility and becoming, Noir Affect asks us to consider affect as also a site of repetition, dissolution, redundancy, unmaking, and decay. It also asks us to consider the way in which the affective dimensions of noir enable the staging of various forms of social antagonism, including those associated with racial, gendered, sexual, and economic inequality. Featuring an Afterword by the celebrated noir scholar Paula Rabinowitz and essays by an array of leading scholars, Noir Affect aims to fundamentally re-orient our understanding of noir. Contributors: Alexander Dunst, Sean Grattan, Peter Hitchcock, Justus Nieland, Andrew Pepper, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Brian Rejack, Pamela Thoma, Kirin Wachter-Grene

“American crime fiction fans will welcome the opportunity to sample the short fiction of some worthy Canadian authors.” —Publishers Weekly Following the success of Toronto Noir, the Noir Series explores new Canadian terrain, featuring both English and Francophone authors. Like the city it springs from, Montreal Noir is an intriguing mix of culture, identities, and neighborhoods with one thing in common: the dark side of human nature. This collection presents stories by Patrick Senécal, Tess Fragoulis, Howard Shrier, Michel Basilières, Robert Pobi, Samuel Archibald, Geneviève Lefebvre, Ian Truman, Johanne Seymour, Arjun Basu, Martin Michaud, Melissa Yi, Catherine McKenzie, Peter Kirby, and Brad Smith. “Montreal solidifies its reputation as the epicentre for Canadian noir in a strong new anthology.” —Quill & Quire “Brings together a bicultural roster of talent by some of the city’s best crime-fiction specialists, with tales from the city’s many neighbourhoods.” —Toronto Star “An impressive roster . . . Stories from across the many sub-genres of mystery: police procedural, thriller, private eye, psychological suspense, and hard-boiled crime.” —Montreal Review of Books “Whether it’s the quirkiness of the characters, the ingenuity of the puzzles, or the big hearts inside some of the darkest villains, noir’s different north of the border.” —Kirkus Reviews

What is literary noir? How do British and American noir thrillers relate to their historical contexts? In considering such questions, this study ranges over hundreds of novels, analysing the politics and poetics of noir from the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler and Cain to the exciting diversity of nineties thrillers, with sections on the tough investigators, gangsters and victims of the Depression years: the first-person killers, femmes fatales and black protagonists of mid-century; the game-players, voyeurs and consumers of contemporary thrillers and future noir.

Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism. Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges in Noir Urbanisms is the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience. In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rubén Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang.