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Launched with the summer ‘04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the geographical area of the book.

Long Island Noir’s authors and stories reveal how Long Island has always been a playground for the rich and famous--and while it used to be that only a select few could afford it, now everyone wants a piece of the pie. The McMansions pop up like mushrooms, limiting resources and destroying an already taxed environment. It feels a little like Rome in its last days--a kind of collective amnesia and blindness to the outside world has taken over. Everyone knows this, but no one wants to do anything about it, because big money is being spent--and made. And as the rich grow richer, the poor grow poorer and more disenfranchised; and greed only breeds more greed and violence. These stories cover the range of Long Island’s extremes, from the comfortably rich, to the horribly poor--people pushed to desperate acts in order to protect what they already have, or to try to take what they don’t from those who do.

Kaylie Jones moved to Sagaponack in 1975, where her family continued to live for more than thirty years. She is the author of five novels, including A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, and the memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me. She teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, and in the Wilkes University low-residency MFA program in professional writing.

Sheila Kohler is the author of eight novels, including Becoming Jane Eyre and Love Child, and three collections of short stories. She has won the PEN/O.Henry Prize twice, the Open Voice, the Smart Family Foundation, the Willa Cather, and the Antioch Review awards. She was a fellow at the Cullman Center and teaches at Bennington and Princeton. Cracks, a film directed by Jordan and Ridley Scott and based on Kohler’s work, was released in spring 2011.

Tim McLoughlin is the editor of Brooklyn Noir and its companion volumes. His debut novel Heart of the Old Country is the basis for the motion picture The Narrows, starring Vincent D’Onofrio. His books have been published in seven languages and his writing has appeared in New York Quarterly, the Huffington Post, and Best American Mystery Stories. He lives on the western tip of Long Island.

Sarah Weinman has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and many other print and online publications. Her fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcok Mystery Magazine, and various anthologies, including Baltimore Noir and Dublin Noir. She lives in Brooklyn, just a mile away from the Atlantic Avenue LIRR hub.

About Us

Drunken! Careening! Writers! is a reading series based on the proposition that all readings should be by: 1) Good Writers; 2) Who read their work well; 3) Something in it makes people laugh (nervous laughter counts). And 15 minutes tops.