Danticat edited this volume for Akashic's Noir series, which assigns each contributor a specific neighborhood or locale and had reached its thirty-sixth city with Haiti. The stories are new work, from Haitian writers including Gary Victor, Kettly Mars and Yanick Lahens along with others based in the diaspora and two foreign writers on Haiti.

In her introduction Danticat records that the project began roughly a year before the earthquake of 12 January 2010, which caused over two hundred thousand deaths and left more than a million people homeless in the capital and in Léogâne, Petit-Goâve and Jacmel; she was writing while survivors were still in makeshift camps. Hardship, she notes, predated the disaster, and so did the humor and invention Haitians have long put into painting, music and fiction, including its darker registers.