3.0
Eight Very Bad Nights: A Collection of Hanukkah Noir
ByPublisher Description
The perfect holiday gift for the crime fiction lover in your life!
Curated by New York Times bestselling author Tod Goldberg, this collection of eleven delightful and twisted Hanukkah capers will entertain you through all eight nights of the Festival of Lights.
In Stefanie Leder’s “Not a Dinner Party Person”—finalist for the ITW Thriller Award for Best Short Story—an unstable pharmaceutical rep tries not to kill anyone at her family dinner on the last night of Hanukkah; in Ivy Pochoda’s “Johnny Christmas,” a taciturn Gulf War vet commissions a tattoo from a man he knew from his prison days, a man not named Christmas but Goldfarb; in David L. Ulin’s “Shamash,” it’s the last night of Hanukkah, and a live-at-home adult son considers doing something drastic to get out of his elderly father’s Upper West Side apartment; in James D.F. Hannah’s “Twenty Centuries,” a pair of detectives solve a curiously unprompted murder during the holiday season.
This captivating collection contains old-school slapstick comedy, hardboiled noir, gritty procedurals, and poignant reminders of the meaning of Hanukkah, offering something for almost every reader willing to take the journey through these twisted tales.
With stories by: Ivy Pochoda, David L. Ulin, James D.F. Hannah, Lee Goldberg, Nikki Dolson, J.R. Angelella, Liska Jacobs, Gabino Iglesias, Stefanie Leder, and Jim Ruland, plus a foreword and story by Tod Goldberg.
Curated by New York Times bestselling author Tod Goldberg, this collection of eleven delightful and twisted Hanukkah capers will entertain you through all eight nights of the Festival of Lights.
In Stefanie Leder’s “Not a Dinner Party Person”—finalist for the ITW Thriller Award for Best Short Story—an unstable pharmaceutical rep tries not to kill anyone at her family dinner on the last night of Hanukkah; in Ivy Pochoda’s “Johnny Christmas,” a taciturn Gulf War vet commissions a tattoo from a man he knew from his prison days, a man not named Christmas but Goldfarb; in David L. Ulin’s “Shamash,” it’s the last night of Hanukkah, and a live-at-home adult son considers doing something drastic to get out of his elderly father’s Upper West Side apartment; in James D.F. Hannah’s “Twenty Centuries,” a pair of detectives solve a curiously unprompted murder during the holiday season.
This captivating collection contains old-school slapstick comedy, hardboiled noir, gritty procedurals, and poignant reminders of the meaning of Hanukkah, offering something for almost every reader willing to take the journey through these twisted tales.
With stories by: Ivy Pochoda, David L. Ulin, James D.F. Hannah, Lee Goldberg, Nikki Dolson, J.R. Angelella, Liska Jacobs, Gabino Iglesias, Stefanie Leder, and Jim Ruland, plus a foreword and story by Tod Goldberg.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesEight Very Bad Nights: A Collection of Hanukkah Noir Reviews
3.0
“My personal ranking with a short review of each~
1. “Dead Weight” by Liska Jacobs: real
2. “Eight Very Bad Nights” by Tod Goldberg: what I imagine Uncut Gems was supposed to make me feel
3. “Twenty Centuries” by James D F Hannah: gritty, emotional, lesbian copaganda (neutral)
4. “Come Let Us Kiss and Part” by Nikki Dolson: wrong place, wrong time, wrong people :/
5. “If I Were a Rich Man” by Lee Goldberg: never let them guess your next move; genuinely wild and unpredictable
6. “Lighting the Remora” by Gabino Iglesias: short and defeatist
7. “Mi Shebeirach” by J R Angelella: sweet ending but otherwise forgetable
8. “Johnny Christmas” by Ivy Pochoda: not that bad but seriously forgetable
9. “The Demo” by Jim Ruland: hot mess express
10. “Shamash” by David L Ulin: could've been so much better, but isn't; the best thing I took from it was the meaning and significance of the shamash, which was very useful for the other stories
11. “Not a Dinner Party Person” by Stefanie Leder: grating, cringeworthy, bordering on "edgelord" vibes”
About Tod Goldberg
Tod Goldberg is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen books, including the award-winning Gangsterland trilogy and Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short fiction has been published widely, including in Best American Mystery & Suspense, and his nonfiction appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Alta, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays. He lives near Palm Springs, CA, where he founded and directs the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at UC Riverside.
Other books by Tod Goldberg
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