Eight Very Bad Nights

May 1, 2024

Bestselling novelist Goldberg (Gangsters Don't Die) curates this crime-fiction anthology for the holiday season, with 12 stories from bestselling and award-winning authors including Ivy Pochoda, Lee Goldberg, and Gabino Iglesias; the stories range from hard-boiled Hanukkah noir to humorous adventures and poignant stories. Prepub Alert.

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August 5, 2024
Goldberg (the Gangsterland quartet) presents a winning anthology of 11 Hanukkah-themed crime stories. Stefanie Leder is perhaps the brightest candle in this menorah: her entry, “Not a Dinner Party Person,” centers on pharmaceutical sales rep Rachel, a proud sociopath whose fraught relationship with her family (“My mother? In an ideal world, the next time I see her would be at her funeral”) leads to an eventful final night of Hanukkah. David L. Ulin is a close second; in his defiantly dark “Shamash,” a New York City man who’s grown weary of caring for his ailing 90-year-old father uses the family menorah to carry out some drastic action. Gabino Iglesias’s “Lighting the Remora,” a tongue-in-cheek caper carried out by small-time crooks who converse in punchy, Pulp Fiction–style banter, also impresses. With their dark hearts and memorable antiheroes, these stories make an entertaining complement to Soho Crime’s Christmas anthology, The Usual Santas. Agent: Jamie Dunham, Dunham Literary.

November 1, 2024
Eleven dark tales offer a perplexing take on the Festival of Lights. Christmas crime stories often focus on the more secular aspects of the holiday: shopping, presents, parties, snow. But many of the stories Goldberg selects seem to regard Hanukkah--a relatively minor festival--as deeply religious and widely observed, even by secular Jews. The tension between characters' focus on celebrating the holiday correctly and the egregious aspects of their personal behavior is unsettling. In David L. Ulin's "Shamash," an aging man becomes increasingly obsessed with his grandmother's menorah as his traumatic past prods him to violence. In James D.F. Hannah's "Twenty Centuries," a mother turns her back on the death of her adult child to go home and light candles with her new husband. A spurned girlfriend uses a Hanukkah party to get revenge against her boyfriend in Liska Jacobs' "Dead Weight," and the annual Hanukkah party at Sucks to Be U Records, with a carefully curated menu of Jewish delicacies, has an equally grisly finale in Jim Ruland's "The Demo." A self-diagnosed sociopath loses it when her no-good brother-in-law disrupts her family's latke celebration in Stefanie Leder's "Not a Dinner Party Person." And editor Goldberg seems to regard his hero's string of thefts, drug deals, and causal mayhem as some sort of Maccabean victory. Only in Lee Goldberg's "If I Were a Rich Man" does the hero recognize the irony of his appropriation of Jewish cultural symbols in facilitating his crimes. Feh.

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