Paris Noir

Featuring brand-new stories by: Cloé Mehdi, Karim Madani, Insa Sané, Christian Roux, Marc Villard, Jean-Pierre Rumeau, Timothée Demeillers, Rachid Santaki, Marc Fernandez, Guillaume Balsamo, Anne Secret, Anne-Sylvie Salzman, and Patrick Pécherot. (All stories were written in French and translated into English by Katie Shireen Assef, David Ball, Nicole Ball, and Paul Curtis Daw.)From the introduction by Hervé Delouche: The term Greater Paris is in vogue today, for it has an administrative cachet and seems to denote a simple extension of the capital--as if a ravenous Paris need only extend her web. However, it was not our goal to embrace the tenets of the metro area`s comprehensive plan, aka the Grand Projet, envisioned as a future El Dorado by the planners and developers. Rather, our aim was to depict the Parisian suburbs in all their plurality and diversity. Without pretending to encompass every spot on the map, we instead opted to give voice and exposure to the localities chosen by the writers who have been part of this adventure. Thus, we decided to adopt the word "suburbs"-- in the plural, obviously, for the periphery of the capital is not a homogeneous bloc, nor is it reducible to a cliché like "the suburban ring" . . . Here are thirteen stories, decidedly noir, to be savored without sugar or sweetener.