Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Death, ; Claire of the Sea Light, Brother, I'm Dying, The Dew Breaker, The Farming of Bones, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Krik? Krak! A 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant," she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, and elsewhere. Her most recent book Everything Inside (Akashic Books) is a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love. Danticat’s latest children’s book, My Mommy Medicine (Roaring Brook Press) is a picture book about the comfort and love a mama offers when her child isn't feeling well. She is also is a contributing writer in in Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers (Akashic Books), an anthology edited by Joyce Carol Oates.

Joyce Carol Oates Oates is the author of such national bestsellers as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys. Her other titles include Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection; and Jack of Spades. She is a recipient of the National Book Award and the 2010 President’s National Humanities Medal. In Oates’ Pursuit (Mysterious Press), less than 24 hours after exchanging vows a newlywed wife steps out into traffic. Then her husband finds clues about what she might be hiding.  Oates is also the editor of New Jersey Noir and Prison Noir and a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. As a queenpin of the noir genre, Oates brings her keen eye to the curation of Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers (Akashic Books) an outstanding anthology of 15 brand-new top-shelf short stories (and six poems by Margaret Atwood) that tweaks the conventions.

Steph Cha is the author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough. She’s the noir editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and USA Today.  Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay (Ecco). In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it’s been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She’s distraught that her sister hasn’t spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace’s understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale. But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence. Attica Locke, Edgar-Award winning author of Bluebird, Bluebird writes, “Steph Cha has taken a dark moment in Los Angeles’s violent history and cracked it wide open, creating a prism of understanding...It’s a touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision that tore a hole through an entire city.”

Valerie Martin is the author of eleven novels, including Trespass, Mary Reilly, Italian Fever, and Property, four collections of short fiction, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize and Britain’s Orange Prize. She is one of the contributing writers in Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers (Akashic Books). Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin 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.