Free (DRM-free) Moscow Noir [City-Themed Russian Mystery & Suspense Anthology]

[ATDrake]

Moscow Noir edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen, who run a literary agency in Russia, is a Russia-set installment in the excellent Akashic Noir series of location-themed mystery/suspense anthologies, this one filled with stories by native Russian and other writers telling mystery & suspense tales set throughout history in the eponymous city and its immediate surrounding regions, free for a limited time courtesy of publisher Akashic Books, who are generously running a holiday advent calendar promotion.

If you happen to like this one and wish to read more (the entire series is well worth it, with the “foreign” volumes often being good introductions to the works of non-English-language authors in translation, and I've been slowly collecting them during the very sporadic price-drop offers), Akashic Books are couponable at Kobo if you want to put them on your wishlist in anticipation of future holiday sales.

Currently free until midnight December 5th directly @ the publisher's promotional blogpost (DRM-free ePub & Mobi available worldwide), and you can read more about the book (and see the entire list of stories and authors) on its regular catalogue page.

Description
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: Alexander Anuchkin, Igor Zotov, Gleb Shulpyakov, Vladimir Tuchkov, Anna Starobinets, Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, Sergei Samsonov, Alexei Evdokimov, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Maxim Maximov, Irina Denezhkina, Dmitry Kosyrev, Andrei Khusnutdinov, and Sergei Kuznetsov.

From the introduction by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen:

“The center of a sprawling state for nearly its entire history, Moscow has attracted diverse communities, who have come to the city in search of better lives—to work, mainly, but also to beg, to glean scraps from the tables of hard-nosed merchants, to steal and rob. The concentration of capital allowed people to tear down and rebuild ad infinitum; new structures were erected literally on the foundations of the old. Before the 1917 Revolution, buildings demolished and resurrected many times over created a favorable environment for all manner of criminal and quasi-criminal elements. After the Revolution, the ideology did not simply encourage destruction but demanded it. The Bolshevik anthem has long defined the public mentality: ‘We will raze this world of violence to its foundations, and then/ We will build our new world: he who was nothing will become everything! . . .”