Search

A chilling noir collection featuring fifteen crime and mystery tales and six poems from female authors.Joyce Carol Oates, a queen-pin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy readers who are sick and tired of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more.With stories by: Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood (poems), Valerie Martin, Aimee Bender, Edwidge Danticat, Sheila Kohler, S.A. Solomon, S.J. Rozan, Lucy Taylor, Cassandra Khaw, Bernice L. McFadden, Jennifer Morales, Elizabeth McCracken, Livia Llewellyn, Lisa Lim, and Steph Cha.Praise for Cutting Edge“The indefatigable Joyce Carol Oates gathers a strong list of names.... Emerging and established authors provide attention-grabbing short works: especially notable are Edwidge Danticat's story on the quotidian horror of domestic violence, Bernice L. McFadden's comic take on the appropriation of racial friendship, and Lisa Lim's illustrations of a grotesque marriage.” —Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine“But of course, in the end, it isn't the themes or the innovations on the format of the short story anthology that make the tales collected in Cutting Edge most “feel” as if you were reading Joyce Carol Oates herself. It is the writing. The tight plots and fresh, flowing prose that go about their business until—snap!—the story's well-oiled mousetrap does its job.” —New York Journal of Books“The 15 stories and six poems in this slim yet weighty all-original noir anthology... are razor-sharp and relentless in their portrayal of life, offering snapshots of dysfunction, everyday toil, and brief joy. It is unusual, however, in its scope, zeroing in not only on what the female characters endure but what they dish out.... Each story sears but does not cauterize, leaving protagonists and readers raw.... Fans of contemporary crime fiction won't want to miss this one.” —Publishers Weekly

There is a new category of authors blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction: women who work or have worked in criminal justice--lawyers, police officers and forensic investigators--who publish crime fiction with characters that resemble real-life counterparts. Drawing on their professional experience, these writers present compelling portrayals of inequality and dysfunction in criminal justice systems from a feminist viewpoint. This book presents the first examination of the true-crime-infused fiction of authors like Dorothy Uhnak, Kathy Reichs and Linda Fairstein.

Before Agatha Christie became the world's Queen of Crime, she stood on the talented shoulders of the female crime authors who came before her. This splendid new anthology by Leslie S. Klinger brings these exceptional writers out of Christie's shadow and back into the spotlight they deserve.Agatha Christie is undoubtedly the world's best-selling mystery author, hailed as the “Queen of Crime,” with worldwide sales in the billions. Christie burst onto the literary scene in 1920, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles; her last novel was published in 1976, a career longer than even Conan Doyle's forty-year span. The truth is that it was due to the success of writers like Anna Katherine Green in America; L. T. Meade, C. L. Pirkis, the Baroness Orczy, and Elizabeth Corbett in England; and Mary Fortune in Australia that the doors were finally opened for women crime-writers. Authors who followed them, such as Patricia Wentworth, Dorothy Sayers, and, of course, Agatha Christie would not have thrived without the bold, fearless work of their predecessors—and the genre would be much poorer for their absence. So while Agatha Christie may still reign supreme, it is important to remember that she did not ascend that throne except on the shoulders of the women who came before her—and inspired her—and who are now removed from her shadow once and for all by this superb new anthology by Leslie S. Klinger. Featuring: Mary Fortune, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Ellen Wood, Elizabeth Corbett, C. L. Pirkis, Geraldine Bonner, Ellen Glasgow, L. T. Meade, Baroness Orczy, Augusta Großer, M. E. Graddon, Anna Katherine Green, Carolyn Wells, Susan Glaspell

A madwoman holds a professor prisoner in this frightening thriller by the Edgar Award–winning “mistress of day-lit terror” (The New York Times). California University mathematics instructor Pat O'Shea is horrified to learn that a fellow faculty member is responsible for the theft of a valuable piece of lab equipment. But biology professor Everett Adams hasn't just turned thief; he's also become a stark raving madman. After a confrontation, Adams leaves his accuser for dead, badly beaten on the outside of town. Now, no one has seen either man in days. When O'Shea awakens in a dilapidated old bungalow on a deserted stretch of nowhere, he's not in the hands of a rescuer, but rather at the mercy of a captor. The watchful old woman is demented, homicidal, and taking wicked delight in keeping a hostage. Her killer hound stands guard, and if all goes according to plan, the gravely injured O'Shea will never be allowed to leave. Frustrated by the ineffective work of the authorities, O'Shea's wife, Anabel, is committed to conducting her own investigation into her husband's disappearance. Amassing a trail of evidence, she follows a strange path of baffling clues, family skeletons, and fatal secrets. One by one, they will lead Anabel to a house on the dark side of a dead-end road.

Many of the leading writers of crime fiction are women - Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell et al - but it still comes as a surprise to many that the first full-length detective novel was by one Metta Fuller whose The Dead Letter, under the alias Seeley Regester, appeared as far back as 1866, predating Wilkie Collins'The Moonstone by two years. In fact. women writers were instrumental in developing the new genre of detective fiction. This anthology selects stories from the late Victorian and Edwardian era including one of the Violet Strange stories by Anna Katharine Green, known as the'mother of the detective novel'; one of the Loveday Brooke stories by Catherine Pirkis, featuring an early private woman detective and a story by the Australian writer Mary Fortune who had written over 500 detective novels by the time Edward VII came to the throne... An absorbing collection belonging on the bookshelf of any serious crime fan.

The companion volume to The Darker Sex and The Dreaming Sex, this absorbing anthology of early women's crime fiction belongs on the bookshelf of any serious crime fanMany of the leading writers of crime fiction are women—Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell et al—but it still comes as a surprise to many that the first full-length detective novel was by one Metta Fuller whose The Dead Letter, under the alias Seeley Regester, appeared as far back as 1866, predating Wilkie Collins'The Moonstone by two years. In fact, women writers were instrumental in developing the new genre of detective fiction. This anthology selects stories from the late Victorian and Edwardian era including one of the Violet Strange stories by Anna Katharine Green, known as the'mother of the detective novel;'one of the Loveday Brooke stories by Catherine Pirkis, featuring an early private woman detective; and a story by the Australian writer Mary Fortune, who had written more than 500 detective novels by the time Edward VII came to the throne.