The Street Smart Omnibus started with a series of seven novelette-length works featuring contemporary urban settings, intricate characters, and engaging, fast-paced plots. Frayed Edge Press originally published these as an homage to the pocket-sized fiction novels sold in French train stations, with influence drawn from detective noir, urban fantasy, and urban fiction works, just the right length for a commute.
Now, these stories are all collected for the first time underneath the same cover, an easier and more convenient way to experience the tales. The classic noir aesthetic of a French train station novelette apparently didn't hit the same way with the American audience, but the tales adapted into an omnibus all the same. While occasionally a little too dramatic for my personal tastes, there is clear aptitude and expertise within these pages, as the authors pay homage to classic genres and tropes in their own incomparable styles.
The collection begins with arguably the star of the collection, Jean-Bernard Pouy, translated by Carolyn Gates, Jean-Philippe Gury, and Robert Helms. Pouy is a prolific author in the French train station fiction universe, best known for his Le Poulpe series of detective novels. According to the editor's introduction, Pouy is also notoriously hard to translate, with his use of French vernacular and slang, and use of Oulipo, the act of writing within pre-determined literary constraints.
Despite the technical difficulty in translation, Full Fare appears here as a witty, fast-paced that finds character in its skillful banter and stark sentences, painting an at-once realistic if not slightly pessimistic view of this tale's niche corner of France, one that retains (or appears to, I can't say I've read the original French) Pouy's signature stylistic conventions and to-the-point voice. Much of this tale is carried by its pithy dialogue and succinct narration, and the result is a linguistically skilled journey into Pouy's own vision of France and its everyday inhabitants.
Following this, Down and Out in Paris, with Cat paints an entirely different picture of Paris, with our protagonist, if he can really be referred to as such, deeply unsatisfied with every aspect of his life despite its grandeur on the surface — a beautiful French girlfriend, a cheap Paris apartment, a cushy English-language job. The landscape of the city provides a backdrop for the depth of the character's lack of satisfaction and journey for contentment, which becomes slowly hinged upon the back of an "anarchist cat". The arc of maturity and self-exploration is carried by the existence of the cat and everything he represents, and thus creates a very interesting, unique exploration of selfishness and the City of Lights both, one that ensures the reader will remain on their toes throughout.
Anarchy is a common theme throughout these tales, with the next title being The Accidental Anarchist, a rapidly-moving tale of a nondescript middle-aged English professor who stumbles into a world of young anarchists vs human traffickers. The prose here is characterized by our main character's acute paranoia and anxiety, and the strange figures that she meets, and the thrum of it deeply pervades each sentence in kind, creating the kind of deeply immersive environment the Street Smart series initially promised. Human, emotional, comical — no stone here is left unturned or unexplored, though the distinctly experimental choices the author makes with the rise and fall of our main character's arc truly round this piece off as one of integral observation.
Conversely, Stealing MacGuffin leads with the character's acute self-awareness, the introduction to the audience as one "drawn into criminal enterprise by opportunity". This twist on a typical crime noir emphasizes the main character's sense of internalized examination, confessional style, and drives an enthralling, plot-heavy story that leaves no room for dull moments and very little to be desired. Though this is a clear homage to the crime noir genre, both past and present, author Matthew Kastel has vividly grasped the bare bones of the genre to create something more, that speaks of his own ownership of the genre and everything that goes into its creation.
Pele's Domain, while following the detective noir thematic structure, takes a slightly darker turn, set against the pressed-for-time backdrop of a lava flow on the Big Island of Hawaii amidst a series of "almost perfect" murders. This is a police procedural with, yet again, a twist, an homage to the genre that does not fear constraints or convention but instead observes the genre merely as a jumping off point for the author's own wiles and whims. Again, fast-paced and yet this tale relies deeply on a compelling character arc that is executed with utmost skill and intrigue.
Where Pele's Domain stretches across the island, our penultimate story, Make the Bear Be Nice by Stephen St. Francis Decky, takes place within a single theater, where a teen trying to get his life back on track spends his time as the night cleaner. Chaos ensues, ensemble casts create friendships, and the heart of the tale revolves, almost secretly, about the quest for a home and the shift from the shared walls of the theater to the private four walls of one's own. This one is gritty, a little dark, a little chaotic, and deeply heartfelt in a very real, raw way.
The conclusion of the omnibus is Shelonda Montgomery's The Day is Gone. It begins with a shock, right from the very first line, though I won't ruin it for you by recounting it in detail. What I will say is that this was a truly gripping tale that, similar to Make the Bear Be Nice, felt real and raw, and realistically infuriating, too. Montgomery aptly captures the frustration of human existence in a driving vignette that leaves no stone unturned.
It's apparent that each story stands alone in technique and talent, but it is equally apparent that the arrangement of these tales within this omnibus requires due credit to the editor as well. Each piece flows smoothly to the next, thematically complimenting one another with a simple ease that does not detract from individual merit or examination, but rather offers the reader the opportunity to sit with this collection and experience it in full, start to finish.
If you'd like to discover the omnibus, or even the individual stories themselves, for yourself, you can find them here
Frayed Edge Press is an independent press located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which specializes in publishing marginalized voices, overlooked literature in translation, and works that wrestle with important questions impacting contemporary society.
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