Ivan Srsen

First, a confession: I have been living under a rock. This was not apparent to me until I read the front matter in Zagreb Noir, which listed nearly 100 other titles in Akashic Books' noir series. Now that I have experienced this member of the series, I am eager to make up for lost time.

Editor Ivan Srsen extends the idea of the noir to encompass tales of gangs, refugees, and a range of other groups and people during the days surrounding the Bosnian War. The war is long over (if any war can be said to be truly over), and the setting of Zagreb, Croatia's capital city, manages to be familiar, exotic, and alien all at the same time. Contemporary Zagreb has come into its own as a culturally rich cosmopolitan city of about a million inhabitants. But its history, before, during, and after the war, covers an arc of time between the imposed order of socialism (in Tito's Yugoslavia), and the sectarian chaos and violence following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Imagine, for yourself, the particular stories haunting those years – the unease you feel about your new neighbors, the vengeance you feel compelled to suppress, the atrocities you fight to forget. And couple that with the everyday struggle to thrive in a modern city, especially one with Zagreb's history.

Readers won't find a lot of that contemporary charm in the stories contained in this volume. In keeping with its noir label, the authors in Zagreb Noir present marginal characters (in the sense that their lives occur outside of press accounts and tourist brochures). Readers will find many links to the noir tradition, and even specific allusions to classic noir literature. For example, the first story, "A Girl in the Garage," brings to mind Poe's classic "The Cask of Amontillado," not to mention his "The Black Cat," and "The Tell-Tale Heart." Other stories summon the mystery and fear associated with the strangers in our midst, sharpened by the brutality of memory – and these stories extend the noir genre beyond what American readers recognize as "hardboiled" to reclaim its true territory: everyday people caught up in extraordinary and threatening circumstances not of their making but of their unmaking. Think Hitchcock having a drink with Chandler, Hammet, and Cain.

Personally, I found no stories in this volume that didn't catch and carry my interest. That's a testament to the craft and skill of the storytellers at work here. It's also a mark of excellence for the editor of this volume, and for the publisher who brings this work to the public. I look forward to catching up on the other works in this series – as soon as I can get out from under this rock.

-- Peter Scisco… (mehr)

I like my stories short and I like my stories dark so the Akashic Noir series is right up my alley. Having now read 56 volumes in the series I think it's safe to say I'm probably not going to find one that doesn't do it for me. That is not to say that some aren't better than others and Zagreb Noir is one of the very best so far.

Like other Eastern European entries(Moscow and St Petersburg come to mind) there is a special darkness to these tales - a grim humor - maybe an after effect of their communist past.

Like many of the international books in the series the best stories are ones that wouldn't/couldn't be written by an American author. Crossbar by Josip Novakovich revolves around a soccer riot gone terribly wrong and is just wonderfully told.

I've complained in the past about the translations in some of the foreign books, but that is not a problem here. All of these read very natural.

Overall a great entry into an equally great series.… (mehr)

A uniformly excellent collection of 14 gritty hard-hitting stories from the bowels of Zagreb. As with the only other Akashic Noir series book I've read so far, Chicago Noir: The Classics, the term noir is applied as a sort of all-encompassing generic term, apparently not meant to be exclusive. The stories here vary in flavors including dark realism, neo-punk, and confessional Bukowskiesque lit. They're unified by a sense of gloominess, despair and a sense of loss and confusion in the decades following the dissolution of Yugoslavia and Croatian independence. If this is the quality to be expected from this new generation of Croat writers, then I'll be looking forward to reading much more. Highly recommended.… (mehr)