Portland Noir

Explore the dark, rainy underbelly of one of America's most beautiful but enigmatic cities.

Brand-new stories by: Gigi Little, Justin Hocking, Chris A. Bolton, Jess Walter, Monica Drake, Jamie S. Rich (illustrated by Joelle Jones), Dan DeWeese, Zoe Trope, Luciana Lopez, Karen Karbo, Bill Cameron, Ariel Gore, Floyd Skloot, Megan Kruse, Kimberly Warner-Cohen, and Jonathan Selwood.

From the downtown streets littered with strip clubs and gutter punks to the north side where gentrification and old school hip-hop collide, Portland, Oregon, is a place that seems straight out of a David Lynch movie. It's a city full of police controversies, hippie artist houses, and overzealous liberals, where even its fiction blurs with its bizarre realities.

Portland Noir is an encompassing literary journey where your tour guides take you to the Shanghai Tunnels, dog parks, dive bars, sex shops, Powell's Books, Voodoo Doughnuts, suspiciously quiet neighborhoods, the pseudo-glitzy Pearl District, Oaks Amusement Park, and a strip club shaped like a jug. Violent crime, petty mischief, and personal tragedy run through these mysterious tales that careen through this cloudy, wet city.

Portland Noir is sure to both charm and frighten readers familiar with this northwest hub and intrigue those who have never traveled to this proudly weird city.

"Portland Noir peels back that feel-good, progressive veneer the city is so proud of to reveal a downbeat, often tragic underbelly unknown to those who live above it." Portland Oregonian

"Portland [Oregon] is known to the world, inasmuch as it is known, as a place where bicycles roam free, urban designers plot bioswales, and gourmet beer flows. Thank God it's not really like that. Those who live here — the talented authors in this collection, for example — understand that a death spirit presides over the land. We glimpse it in Floyd Skloot's poignant Alzheimer's gothic and Jess Walters' devilish tale of a newspaperman's revenge, in the narcotized ennui of Dan DeWeese's workaday narrator, and the petty, practical criminality depicted by Jamie S. Rich and Joelle Jones. Taken together, the voices of Portland Noir describe a city — unlike the one seen so often in the New York Times food section — of hard luck and emotional vice. Which is to say, a city you might actually want to live in." Jon Raymond, author of Livability

Kevin Sampsell is a bookstore employee and writer. He is the author of a short story collection, Creamy Bullets (Chiasmus Press), and the upcoming memoir A Common Pornography (HarperPerennial, January 2010). He is also the editor of The Insomniac Reader (Manic D Press) and the publisher of the micropress Future Tense Books.

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