As long as I am banging the drum for short fiction, let me apprise you of the latest addition to the Akashic Books Noir Series: Boston Noir edited by Boston homeboy Dennis Lehane (The Given Day).

Since the 2004 publication of Brooklyn Noir, that series has added some 30 titles, all of which follow the same template: An editor native to the title city assembles other denizens of that city and each provides a story specific to various neighborhoods of the metropolis in question. Featured in this volume: Stewart O'Nan, Patricia Powell, John Dufresne, Lynne Heitman, Don Lee, Russ Aborn, Itabari Njeri, Jim Fusilli, Brendan DuBois, Dana Cameron, and of course Lehane, whose introduction contains this pearl: "That's the paradox of the new Boston--what's lost has, in many cases, been taken; what's left is what people can't sell. Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times so the changing times instead roll over them."