Critiques en avant-premièreBrad Watson

Alabama joins Mississippi as fertile Deep South soil for the Noir Series. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographic area of the book. Brand-new stories by: Ace Atkins, Tom Franklin, Anita Miller Garner, Suzanne Hudson, Kirk Curnutt, Wendy Reed, Carolyn Haines, Anthony Grooms, Michelle Richmond, Winston Groom, Ravi Howard, Thom Gossom Jr., Brad Watson, Daniel Wallace, D. Winston Brown, and Marlin Barton. From the introduction by Don Noble: There must be places like Hawaii where the idea of noir would be difficult to accommodate. Sunshine, drinks in a coconut, warm beaches, and leis do not generate the fear, darkness, and despair on which noir thrives. Alabama also has plenty of sunshine, some lovely beaches, and only a few foggy waterfronts where miscreants lurk, but it has been a famously dark place. Americans of a certain age read in their daily papers about the burning of the Freedom Riders’ bus in Anniston and about the KKK beating those riders at the Birmingham and Montgomery bus stations in May 1961, with the silent cooperation of law enforcement. Americans actually watched, on the evening news, the German shepherds and fire hoses used on demonstrators in Birmingham and the violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. These days, Alabama has truly turned a corner on race, but the past will not, should not, and in fact cannot be forgotten. We are aware of the past here on a daily basis . . . The stories [in Alabama Noir] range from the deadly grim to some that are actually mildly humorous. We see desperate behavior on the banks of the Tennessee River, in the neighborhoods of Birmingham, in the affluent suburbs of Mobile, in a cemetery in Montgomery, and even on the deceptively pleasant beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.

Dark and brilliant tales capturing the strangeness of human (and almost-human) life. In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes us even deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of human beings. In prose so perfectly pitched as to suggest some celestial harmony, he writes about every kind of domestic discord: unruly or distant children, alienated spouses, domestic abuse, loneliness, death, divorce. In his masterful title novella, a freshly married teenaged couple are visited by an unusual pair of inmates from a nearby insane asylum—and find out exactly how mismatched they really are. With exquisite tenderness, Watson relates the brutality of both nature and human nature. There’s no question about it. Brad Watson writes so well—with such an all-seeing, six-dimensional view of human hopes, inadequacies, and rare grace—that he must be an extraterrestrial.