64 Parishes

Shrimp Boats and White Lace

The delightful bayou sketches of Madame Toussaint’s Wedding Day

"A Child Out of Desire"

Clarence Nero’s semi-autobiographical novel Cheekie paints a vivid image of the Desire Housing Project

“A Game with Death”

The murder mystery novel that gripped Depression-era New Orleans

Confessionals, Baseball, and Forever-Spreading Suburbs

Andre Dubus's Lafayette stories

Motherhood and Its Malcontents

Patty Friedmann’s The Exact Image of Mother

Peculiar and Incendiary

Julian Moreau’s The Black Commandos.

Always on the Threshold

“God, don’t let me die before I do something useful.”

Diet Gospel

H. Leighton Steward’s Sugar Busters!

Bad Romance, Bad Research

Cornell Woolrich’s Waltz into Darkness

Peace, Justice, and the Cajun Way

Tim Edler’s Crawfish-Man

Brief, Brutish, and Bacchic

Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints

Wearing Masks 364 Days a Year

John Rechy's City of Night

“Call Me Shakbatina”

LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker

Quarrels with America

Robert Stone's A Hall of Mirrors

Misery Tea

Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change

A Pox on All Their Houses

Valerie Martin's A Recent Martyr

Godforsaken, Imbecilic, and Insane 

John Dufresne’s Louisiana Power & Light 

Obsessed with New Orleans

Rock journalist Nik Cohn’s Triksta chronicles a chapter in the city’s hip hop history

Emma Wilson Emery

Louisiana’s first poet laureate was female—and vehemently anti-war

The Poor Man’s Truman Capote

Speed Lamkin stayed stuck in the other author’s shadow

Sea Changes

Shirley Ann Grau’s debut novel evokes the coast

“Too Damn Mean to Cry”

A Harlem Renaissance look at the ruin of a man

Black and Blue

Between the covers with Steve Cannon

Moonlight, Magnolias, and Marxism on the Bayou Teche

Barbara Giles’ The Gentle Bush rewrites Gone With the Wind

Can You Hear Me, Sergeant Blue?

A hard-boiled detective in an intergalactic world

Grifter’s Paradise

Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side stalked the sordid side of Depression-era New Orleans

Grifter's Paradise

Nelson Algren’s "A Walk on the Wild Side" stalked the sordid side of Depression-era New Orleans

Plaquemines Picaresque

On the road with The Great Big Doorstep, the second and final novel by New Orleans writer E. P. O'Donnell

A Lesson On Waiting

Fatima Shaik's The Mayor of New Orleans

"The novella is a critique of race, art, and politics that stings as much, if not more so, today than it did three decades ago."

Twentieth Century Millennial: Revisiting Faulkner's Mosquitoes