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Over the last three decades, Italian crime fiction has demonstrated a trend toward a much higher level of realism and complexity. The origins of the New Italian Epic, as it has been coined by some of its proponents, can be found in the widespread backlash against the Mafia-sponsored murders of Sicilian magistrates which culminated with the assassinations of Judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. Though beginning in the Italian language, this prolific, popular movement has more recently found its way into the English language and hence it has found a much wider international audience. Following a brief, yet detailed, history of the cultural and economic development of Sicily, t...
A companion to contemporary German crime fiction for English-speaking audiences is overdue. Starting with the earlier Swiss “classics” Glauser and Dürrenmatt and including a number of important Austrian authors, such as Wolf Haas and Heinrich Steinfest, this volume will cover the essential writers, genres, and themes of crime fiction written in German. Where necessary and appropriate, crime fiction in media other than writing (TV-series, movies) will be included. Contemporary social and political developments, such as gender issues, life in a multicultural society, and the afterlife of German fascism today, play a crucial role in much of recent German crime fiction. A number of contribu...
'The foreigner' is a familiar character in popular crime fiction, from the foreign detective whose outsider status provides a unique perspective on a familiar or exotic location to the xenophobic portrayal of the criminal 'other'. Exploring popular crime fiction from across the world, The Foreign in International Crime Writing examines these popular works as 'transcultural contact zones' in which writers can tackle such issues as national identity, immigration, globalization and diaspora communities. Offering readings of 20th and 21st century crime writing from Norway, the UK, India, China, Europe and Australasia, the essays in this book open up new directions for scholarship on crime writing and transnational literatures.
First Published in 2016. If scholarship on Cuban studies after the 1959 revolution focused on the historical and cultural aspects of the construction of a socialist order, the post-1989 crisis of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe raised questions about the island’s state as a socialist model. The scholarly gaze gradually began to focus on possibilities for alternative transformations at various levels of social life rather than on the deepening of traditional twentieth-century state socialism. This volume explores the newly emergent themes and debates about Cuban society and history.
Bologna on the 15th August. Unbearable heat, an empty city. Claudia is a young student in a hurry to return to the hospital bedside of her dying grandmother. Tomas, a young punk, on his way to elope with his girlfriend Francesca and rescue her from her abusive father. Aldo is a husband with guilty secrets that must be erased from his apartment before his wife returns. All three have an urgent need to be somewhere else. But then they're trapped in a lift and the jeopardy escalates in this dark, twisting and taught psychological: one of them is a serial killer...
Italian crime writing is replacing that of Scandinavia as the fastest growing in the genre. The huge success of Niccolo Ammaniti, followed by the Gabriele Salvatore film of the same name took the UK by storm. Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalban series (Picador), Carlo Lucarelli's Almost Blue (Vintage) and carte Blanche (Europa) and Massimo Carlotto's The Good-bye Kiss (Europa) are further evidence of this surge. These authors, and others, are represented in this volume, which contains nine gripping and often darkly hilarious stories.
A woman hounded after an abortion, separated from her children, pushed to the edge of insanity.
A politician discovers a portrait of his wife in a Paris exhibition that leads him to conclude that she is having an affair with the artist. He hires two inexperienced private detectives - non-identical twins - to investigate but the case turns ugly when she is found poisoned. The sudden twists and turns in plot and dark humour make this satire of Catalan politics a fascinating insight into the life of Barcelona's inhabitants, both by day and night.
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Crime fiction has become a key element in Latin American literature. The rise in production of the genre can be explained by an urgency to explore issues of morality in societies which incorporate varying levels of censorship and corruption. Through a focus on the concept of the crime scene itself, this book identifies and interrogates some of the principal developments in contemporary Latin American crime fiction. In ten chapters which cover Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela, and generic diversity which spans police procedurals, narcoliteratura, postmodern detection, and historical portrayals of crimes, the authors investigate how the crime scene - which has always been central to the genre and its subgenres - critiques local and global issues, including social injustice, discrimination, neoliberalism, violence, identity, corruption, and memory.