Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul

Roger D. Abrahams, Nick Spitzer

"Blues for New Orleans is a generous study of Mardi Gras, but it is also a creative intervention, a passionate explanation (and defense) of creolization, a cultural rescue operation. It is a furious, blues-tinged, erudite hymn to our greatest vernacular city. Read it and weep; read it and rejoice!"—Edward Hirsch, President, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

"Will New Orleans become a memory and a myth? Will the bon temps ever roulette again? I took for granted many of the things in this book as I experienced them every day. As residents, we never imagined a day when we would be called on to plead for recognition of our worth to our city. But, like the old folks said: 'It goes to show, you never can tell.' Without an awareness of the many contributions to the city's culture inherent in the make up of the neighborhoods, the planners can't begin to plan realistically. The information in this historic work is much needed by those who are rebuilding New Orleans. I thank the authors for their deep and clear insight on New Orleans culture and what goes into making an artistic American city."—Charles Neville

"If there was ever any question about the resilience of this endlessly fascinating city, this imaginative book should lay it to rest. In the land of dreamy dreams, where order is a doubloon's throw from disorder, and paradox reigns with pleasure, the carnival spirit has always held New Orleans together even when its civic culture seemed broken beyond repair. Blues for New Orleans is more than a study of Mardi Gras' origins in the polyglot order of Atlantic World Creoles; it is a wonderful meditation on what it would mean to lose New Orleans."—Lawrence N. Powell, Professor of History, Tulane University, and author of Troubled Memory and other works on Louisiana

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the citizens of New Orleans regroup and put down roots elsewhere, many wonder what will become of one of the nation's most complex creole cultures. New Orleans emerged like Atlantis from under the sea, as the city in which some of the most important American vernacular arts took shape. Creativity fostered jazz music, made of old parts and put together in utterly new ways; architecture that commingled Norman rooflines, West African floor plans, and native materials of mud and moss; food that simmered African ingredients in French sauces with Native American delicacies. There is no more powerful celebration of this happy gumbo of life in New Orleans than Mardi Gras. In Carnival, music is celebrated along the city's spiderweb grid of streets, as all classes and cultures gather for a festival that is organized and chaotic, individual and collective, accepted and licentious, sacred and profane.

The authors, distinguished writers who have long engaged with pluralized forms of American culture, begin and end in New Orleans—the city that was, the city that is, and the city that will be—but traverse geographically to Mardi Gras in the Louisiana Parishes, the Carnival in the West Indies and beyond, to Rio, Buenos Aires, even Philadelphia and Albany. Mardi Gras, they argue, must be understood in terms of the Black Atlantic complex, demonstrating how the music, dance, and festive displays of Carnival in the Greater Caribbean follow the same patterns of performance through conflict, resistance, as well as open celebration.

After the deluge and the finger pointing, how will Carnival be changed? Will the groups decamp to other Gulf Coast or Deep South locations? Or will they use the occasion to return to and express a revival of community life in New Orleans? Two things are certain: Katrina is sure to be satirized as villainess, bimbo, or symbol of mythological flood, and political leaders at all levels will undoubtedly be taken to task. The authors argue that the return of Mardi Gras will be a powerful symbol of the region's return to vitality and its ability to express and celebrate itself.

University of Pennsylvania Press

Writing and Illustrating Children's Books for Publication

Berthe Amoss

The world of publishing has changed dramatically in the ten years since this popular book first started helping aspiring children's book writers and illustrators. Now here it is again, brimming with the same popular features - true "case histories," writing exercises, checklists, reading lists, and two complementary perspectives on each step of the writing, illustrating, and publishing process - but also updated with new information and features reflecting current realities and trends. Now learn how you can compete with celebrity authors and name-brand series; how you can write, research, and even illustrate on the computer; how you can communicate with publishers via e-mail and the Internet.

F & W Publications

Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum

(Due out Fall of 2006)

Julie Kane and Grace Bauer (editors)

Xavier Review Press

Recipes From Historic Louisiana: Cooking with Louisiana's Finest Restaurants

Steve and Linda Bauer

Recipes From Historic Louisiana is a collection of favorite recipes from chefs at forty-five enduring eating establishments, all at home in storied buildings across Louisiana, from Alexandria through Evangeline Country to venerable New Orleans. Intriguing stories combine with tantalizing recipes to enable the reader to 
discover the pure joy of dining throughout historic Louisiana. The sublime Brennan's on old Royal Street in New Orleans offers the 
fabled Bananas Foster and Crabmeat Imperial. Chef Emeril Lagasse, from Emeril's Delmonico on the streetcar line of New 
Orleans' St. Charles Avenue, gives you his own Crabmeat Remick. Still holding court in the Vieux Carré is landmark Maison Dupuy, 
whose Chef Dominique reveals the secret of his Fire Roasted Shrimp. Turn-of-the-century style and Cajun hospitality blend at The Bailey Hotel in Bunkie of Avoyelle Parish, where Roast Duck and Andouille Pasta is accompanied by Tomato and Goat Cheese 
Salad with Basil/Kalamata Olive Vinaigrette. In Shreveport, Mabry House opens its door for you to be warmed by their Spiced 
Butternut Squash Soup.

Oh! there are so many more! Il y a beaucoup pour vous enchanter dans le cuisine de la Louisiane.

Texas A&M University Press

ISBN: 1-931721-72-6, Hardcover $24.95

Leaving L. A.

(Due out September 2006)

Rexanne Becnel

There's a first time for everything as thirty-nine-year-old Zoe Vidrine learned the hard way. She was pregnant! Now the aging rock 'n' roller had to change her tune fast. Her plan: leave behind the temptations of L.A.--and her famous hard-partying ex who had got her into this mess--and return to her family's Louisiana homestead to regroup.

It had been twenty years, and the Day Glo hippie haven where Zoe had spent an unhappy childhood was gone, remodeled in the signature pastels of her prim sister Alice. Alice's aesthetic sense was hard enough to swallow, but her holier-than-thou attitude set the stage for a showdown. Still, as the sisters gradually came to terms with their shared past, would there be a meeting of the minds? Talk about firsts…

Harlequin

Last of the Red Hot Poppas 

(Due out September 2006)

Jason Berry

“Right-wing flag enthusiasts, big oil power brokers, luckless inheritors of environmental degradation, professional gamblers, sexual profligates, ACLU lawyers, and political hit men—Last of the Red Hot Poppas has all of these and more. Jason Berry, quintessential Louisiana insider and witty chronicler of what passes for morality in the halls of power, has concocted a tantalizing mix of comic misdemeanors and serious criminal activity.”—Valerie Martin, author of Property

“Nobody understands Louisiana politics better than Jason Berry or writes so convincingly about its corruption, color, and complexity. Last of the Red Hot Poppas had me laughing out loud and turning pages as fast as I could.”—Christine Wiltz, author of The Last Madame: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

Last of the Red Hot Poppas is part ribald whodunit, part social satire, and part “spiritual comedy,” as Berry calls it. It’s a chaotic romp through the many levels of “Looziana,” but above all, it is a novel about the struggle to maintain one’s integrity in a mad world of politics and power.

Chin Music Press

Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?

Jason Berry (contributor) 

New Orleans is a complex American city that is in dire need of help. Katrina and corporate greed threaten to wash away its nuances, and that is why Chin Music Press decided to gather the voices of the Crescent City in a special volume of essays, art and information. Inside Do You Know, you'll find the rage of a people treated by their own government like an "ugly, unwanted stepchild," as Toni McGee Causey puts it, but you'll also find laughter as boy scouts navigate a Mardi Gras parade or as a rather bookish professor steps onto Bourbon Street for the first time. Do You Know takes the reader back to the New Orleans of yesteryear with 19th century engravings of the city and musings from writers, such as British geologist Charles Lyell's reflections on the 1846 Fat Tuesday: "We saw persons armed with bags of flour, which they showered down copiously on anyone who seemed particularly proud of his attire."

Chin Music Press  

Before the Saltwater Came

Wendy Billiot

America’s vanishing wetland is an issue springing to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. Children will embrace and respond positively to LaLoutre*, the grandmotherly otter, as she gently tells of her life in the Louisiana marsh. They will learn about the beauty and charm of the wetland and how its gradual disappearance affects the wildlife and plants. Younger children will especially enjoy the illustrations as LaLoutre grows in her changing environment. Both children and adults will be challenged at the end of the story, as LaLoutre asks, “Now, what will YOU do?”  

*rhymes with  foot

Wetland Books

Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans

Roy Blount, Jr.

“Betcha I can tell ya / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Betchadollar, / Betchadollar, / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Got your shoes on your feet, / Got your feet on the street, / And the street’s in Noo / Awlins, Loo- / Eez-ee-anna. Where I, for my part, first ate a live oyster and first saw a naked woman with the lights on. . . . Every time I go to New Orleans I am startled by something.”

So writes Roy Blount Jr. in this exuberant, character-filled saunter through a place he has loved almost his entire life—a city “like no other place in America, and yet (or therefore) the cradle of American culture.” Here we experience it all through his eyes, ears, and taste buds: the architecture, music, romance (yes, sex too), historical characters, and all that glorious food.

The book is divided into eight Rambles through different parts of the city. Each closes with lagniappe—a little bit extra, a special treat for the reader: here a brief riff on Gennifer Flowers, there a meditation on naked dancing. Roy Blount knows New Orleans like the inside of an oyster shell and is only too glad to take us to both the famous and the infamous sights. He captures all the wonderful and rich history—culinary, literary, and political—of a city that figured prominently in the lives of Jefferson Davis (who died there), Truman Capote (who was conceived there), Zora Neale Hurston (who studied voodoo there), and countless others, including Andrew Jackson, Lee Harvey Oswald, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Jelly Roll Morton, Napoléon, Walt Whitman, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Earl Long, Randy Newman, Edgar Degas, Lillian Hellman, the Boswell Sisters, and the Dixie Cups.

Above all, though, Feet on the Street is a celebration of friendship and joie de vivre in one of America’s greatest and most colorful cities, written by one of America’s most beloved humorists.

Crown Publishing Group

Patricia Brady

"Splendid... a compelling new portrait of a woman and her time." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

With this revelatory and painstakingly researched book, Martha Washington, the invisible woman of American history, at last gets the biography she deserves. In place of the domestic frump of popular imagination, Patricia Brady resurrects the wealthy, attractive, and vivacious young widow who captivated the youthful George Washington. Here are the able landowner, the indomitable patriot (who faithfully joined her husband each winter at Valley Forge), and the shrewd diplomat and emotional mainstay. And even as it brings Martha Washington into sharper and more accurate focus, this sterling life sheds light on her marriage, her society, and the precedents she established for future First Ladies.

Viking Adult

Accordions, Fiddles, Two-Steps, and Swing  

(Forthcoming)

Ryan Brasseaux and Kevin Fontenot (editors)

Center for Louisiana Studies

Stir the Pot: The Real History of the Cajun Table

Ryan A. Brasseaux 

Despite the increased popularity of Cajun foods such as gumbo, crawfish etouffee, and boudin (a pork and rice sausage), relatively little is known about the history of this fascinating cuisine. Stir the Pot explores its origins and evolution from the seventeenth-century French settlement in Nova Scotia to the explosion of Cajun food onto the American dining scene over the past few decades.

Hippocrene Books

ISBN: 0-7818-1120-1, Hardcover $18.95

Soul Kitchen

Poppy Z. Brite

If you can't stand the heat...Get the hell out of New Orleans!

Liquor has become one of the hottest restaurants in town, thanks in part to chefs Rickey and G-man’s wildly creative, booze-laced food. At the tail end of a busy Mardi Gras, Milford Goodman walks into their kitchen—he’s spent the last ten years in Angola Prison for murdering his boss, a wealthy New Orleans restaurateur, but has recently been exonerated on new evidence and released. Rickey remembers him as an ingenious chef and hires him on the spot.

When a pill-pushing doctor and a Carnival scion talk Rickey into consulting at the restaurant they’re opening in one of the city’s “floating casinos,” Rickey recommends Milford for the head chef position and stays on to supervise. But soon Rickey finds himself medicating a kitchen injury with the doctor’s wares, and G-man grows tired of holding down the fort at Liquor alone. As the new restaurant moves toward its opening, Rickey learns that Milford’s past is inextricably linked with one of the project’s backers, a man whose intentions begin to seem more and more sinister.

Full of the flavor of one of America’s greatest cities, Soul Kitchen is a sharp commentary on race relations in pre-Katrina New Orleans and a fast ride through the dark side of haute cuisine.

Three Rivers Press

Uncivilized Beasts and Shameless Hellions: Travels with an NPR Correspondent

(Due out September 2006)

John F. Burnett

In this candid, intimate account, an award-winning 20-year veteran NPR correspondent takes readers behind the scenes of the major events of our time, letting us see what it's really like gathering the news on the front lines.

As a radio journalist whose work appears regularly on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, John F. Burnett has reported from the Branch Davidian standoff and the Kosovo conflict. He has covered the drug wars in Central America; been embedded in a Marine Division in Iraq; and weathered Hurricane Katrina, breaking news hourly on the conditions in New Orleans. And he was one of NPR's lead reporters on 9/11 and its aftermath.

But no matter how much time Burnett has on the air to report his stories—and how expertly he has done so—there are always valuable details that aren't mentioned. Now he fills in those rich tidbits, letting us witness the parts of the stories that remained off the air.

In Uncivilized Beasts and Shameless Hellions, Burnett exposes the hilarious moments, bizarre encounters, dangerous highways, insufferable colleagues, and unsung heroes he's known through his adventures as an NPR reporter. The result is a revealing and personal account that will fascinate not only NPR listeners but also anyone interested in the state of our world today and how the media covers it.

Rodale Press

The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren

John Burt (editor)

Winner of the 1998 Jules and Frances Landry Award

A central figure in twentieth-century American literature, Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was appointed by the Library of Congress as the first Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985. Although better known for his fiction, especially his novel All the King’s Men, it is mainly his poetry—spanning sixty years, fifteen volumes of verse, and a wide range of styles—that reveals Warren to be one of this nation's foremost men of letters.

T.S. Eliot said, “We must know all of Shakespeare’s work in order to know any of it.” Something similar may be said of the poetry of Warren. In this indispensable volume, John Burt, Warren’s literary executor, has assembled every poem Warren ever published (with the exception of Brother to Dragons, the later version of which is available in the LSU Press Voices of the South series), including the many poems he published in The Fugitive and other magazines, as well as those that appeared in his small press works and broadsides. Burt has also exhaustively collated all of the published versions of Warren’s poems—which, in some cases, appeared as many as six different times with substantive revisions in every line—as well as his typescripts and proofs. And since Warren never seemed to have reread any of his books without a pencil in his hand, Burt has referred to Warren’s personal library copies and also the ones he gave Stuart Wright. This comprehensive edition also contains textual notes, lists of emendations, and explanatory notes.

Warren was born and raised in Guthrie, Kentucky, and southern agrarian values and a predilection for storytelling were ingrained in him as a young boy. By 1925, when he graduated from Vanderbilt University, he was already the most promising of that exceptional set of poets and intellectuals known as the Fugitives. Warren devoted most of the 1940s and 1950s to writing prose and literary criticism, but from the late 1950s he was primarily a poet, with each successive volume of verse that he penned demonstrating his rigorous and growing commitment to poetry. The continued visionary power and technical virtuosity of his work in the 1970s and early 1980s emanated from his strongly held belief that “only insofar as the work [of art] establishes and expresses a self can it engage us.” Many of Warren’s later poems, which he deemed “some of my best,” rejoice in the possibilities of old age and the poet’s ability for “continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process.”

LSU Press

The Nature of Things at Lake Martin: Exploring the Wonders of Cypress Island Preserve in Southern Louisiana

Nancy Camel

The Nature of Things at Lake Martin: Exploring the wonders of Cypress Island Preserve in southern Louisiana is a 128-page hardcover book describing the 9,300-acre preserve that includes one of the most impressive wading bird rookeries in North America. Beautifully illustrated with photographs of birds, alligators, furry animals and people who live here, as well as pictures of the woods and waters of the area. The book has two maps, lists of the 200-plus birds that have been seen here, and tips on photographing birds and other animals.

Acadian House

Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm

(Due out in August 2006)

Richard Campanella

Five years in the making, Geographies of New Orleans unveils fresh new perspectives on a famous old city, from its fragile deltaic terrain, to its striking built environment, to its diverse ethnic makeup, to its devastation by Hurricane Katrina. Geographer Richard Campanella brings computer cartography, aerial imagery, spatial analysis, and fieldwork to the study of urban and regional history. In chapters with intriguing titles such as “America’s Oldest Multicultural Society?,” “What the Yellow Pages Reveals About New Orleans,” “Creole New Orleans: The Geography of a Controversial Ethnicity,” “Paradoxical Yet Typical: The Geography of the African-American Community,” and “Hurricane Katrina and the Geographies of Catastrophe,” Campanella integrates hundreds of historical sources with custom-made maps, graphs, photos, and satellite images to explore the intricate urban fabrics of this fascinating city, up to the moment of their terrible shredding.

Center for Louisiana Studies

Coroner's Journal: Stalking Death in Louisiana

Louis Cataldie

The frank and unvarnished memoir of a life spent stalking death in the Deep South.  Baton Rouge is a little town with big-city problems. Rich with Creole history, colorful locals, and a strong sense of community, it's also the home of Napoleonic codes, stubborn cops, and a sometimes-troubled leadership. Baton Rouge-which literally means "Red Stick"-lives up to its bloody namesake.  

And after more than ten years as a deputy coroner and then as its chief coroner, Louis Cataldie has seen his fair share of unusual and disturbing cases. They range from the bizarre to the heartbreaking: an LSU professor killed by a barn door; the bones of a young woman found scattered in a churchyard; and as many as three serial killers loose at one time under Cataldie's watch. He has worked the scene of one of the Malvo/ Muhammad Beltway Sniper shootings and had a hand in bringing to justice serial killer Derrick Todd Lee in a controversial investigation that was featured in an ABC Prime Time special with Diane Sawyer and Patricia Cornwell.  

Coroner's Journal is an unflinching look at a world that television dramas such as CSI can only begin to show us.

Putnam Adult

New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City

Andrei Codrescu

For two decades NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and piratesare palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps.

Codrescu’s essays have been called “satirical gems,” “subversive,” “sardonic and stunning,” “funny,” “gonzo,” “wittily poignant,” and “perverse”—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly’s on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost.

New Orleans, Mon Amouris an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill  

Married to the Mop

Barbara Colley

As owner of Maid for a Day, Charlotte LaRue is cleaning up New Orleans house by house. When it comes to hired help, she’s the best there is, especially if murder runs in the family...

Though she’s short two employees, Charlotte answers a desperate plea the weekend before Mardi Gras. A woman named Emily Rossi is hosting a huge bash for out-of-town guests, and just lost her maid to a family emergency. It seems an acquaintance of hers from the society set highly recommended Charlotte’s services—so she makes Charlotte an offer she can’t refuse…

And Charlotte soon learns why. Emily’s husband, Robert, just happens to be the most ruthless crime boss in the country. The number-one suspect in the murder of his own father, he’s taken over the reins of the “family business.”

As usual, Charlotte keeps her nose to the grindstone—but that doesn’t stop her from seeing the dysfunctional Rossi clan in all its glory. Robert’s mother is seemingly senile, his daughter hates him, he quarrels with his brothers, and Charlotte suspects him of abusing his wife. She also gets a front-row seat to an explosive display of Robert’s hair-trigger temper when he finds some of his priceless Faberge eggs missing.

Nevertheless, Charlotte agrees to help at the costume ball when one of the servers comes down with the flu. She’s beginning to think that the party is a cover for Robert’s illegal activities, when the man himself is found dead in the library. And there’s Emily, standing over her husband with a bloody knife in her hand.

The case seems cut-and-dried—to anyone but Charlotte, that is. Although Emily looks guilty as sin, Charlotte has seen enough of the Rossi family’s dirty laundry to suspect everyone. And the Faberge eggs continue to disappear. If there’s a crack in the killer’s plan, Charlotte will find it, because she won’t stand for anything—least of all, murder—being swept under the rug. But she’d better tread carefully if she doesn’t want to spend Fat Tuesday in the bayou, sleeping with the catfish…

Kensington

ISBN: 0-7582-0764-6, Hardcover $22.00

Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock N Roll

Rick Coleman

Rock 'n' roll defined the last half of the twentieth century, and while many think of Elvis Presley as the genre's driving force, the truth is that Fats Domino, whose records have sold more than 100 million copies, was the first to put it on the map with such hits as "Ain't That a Shame" and "Blueberry Hill." In Blue Monday, acclaimed R&B scholar Rick Coleman draws on a multitude of new interviews with Fats Domino and many other early musical legends (among them Lloyd Price, the Clovers, Charles Brown, and members of Buddy Holly's group, the Crickets) to create a definitive biography of not just an extraordinary man but also a unique time and place: New Orleans at the birth of rock 'n' roll. Coleman's groundbreaking research makes for an immense cultural biography, the first to thoroughly explore the black roots of rock 'n' roll and its impact on civil rights inAmerica. A true music lovers' biography, Blue Monday, includes new revelations about the politics behind the music labels of the 1930s and 1940s, and provides a searing indictment of the great white myths of rock 'n' roll. Coleman also brings the African-American culture of New Orleans to life, and his narrative is passionate, compassionate, and authoritative. Blue Monday is the first biography to convey the full scope of Fats Domino's impact on the popular music of the twentieth century.

Da Capo Press

What Gets into Us

Moira Crone

Interconnected stories from an unforgettable North Carolina town

In What Gets Into Us, the new collection of short stories by Moira Crone, a curious child discovers that some believe "the gods who made this world didn't make it right, and they are terribly sorry about it." A nine-year-old girl is the only one who realizes that her mother's mental illness has put the family's survival at stake. A shy African American woman confronts evil directly in a terrifying act of love. A teenage orphan replaces a wayward son in a privileged but unhappy family. A young carpenter decides that if his baby is going to be born right, he will have to commit a crime and build the world anew.

Fayton, North Carolina, is a rural town in which everyone knows everyone else's business. Crone explores this fictional landscape and its inhabitants from many angles. The stories follow the lives of men and women who grew up together in Fayton. Full of memorable characters from several generations, this story cycle evolves into a chronicle of a region and its characters. Through it, Crone meditates on the mix of history and spirit that shapes souls and creates community.

From the perspectives of its various protagonists—white and black, male and female, young and old—we watch as Fayton comes to deal with the charged issues of race, feminism, southern traditions, and the unforeseen changes wrought by economics and technology. What Gets Into Us is a powerful story cycle that resonates as deeply as a classic novel.

Letter in a Woodpile

Ed Cullen

A delightful collection of evocative essays from NPR commentator (All Things Considered) Ed Cullen. "Like many of us, I spend too much time in an office. My best memories from childhood are outdoors-bouncing a tennis ball against the front porch steps...making up a baseball game, camping, and fishing."

Letter in a Woodpile contains humorous commentaries on life in southern Louisiana, including Mardi Gras, science fairs, and how denizens of Guatemala North (Baton Rouge) stay cool.

Cool Springs Press

Wide Awake in the Pelican State: Stories by Contemporary Louisiana Writers

Ann Dobie (Editor)

“Perhaps because of the direction the world is going, nowadays it sometimes seems difficult to distinguish a Louisiana writer from a writer from any other part of the country. . . . At their heart, nearly all these stories are not about externals; they are about intractable personal problems that may be universal. . . . Yet all the stories have come out of Louisiana, at least in some way.”—Ernest J. Gaines, from his foreword

Wide Awake in the Pelican State—which mimics the title of Dinty W. Moore’s contribution to the collection—brings together twenty-one of the finest modern writers who claim Louisiana as home, having lived all or some part of their lives in the Pelican State. Each author shares the knack of telling a good story, a Louisiana tradition that dates back two hundred years to the tales told by African American griots and the stories swapped among Mississippi river workers on boats, in taverns, and around campfires.

Though united by talent and place, these writers speak with inflections that vary by gender, race, education, religion, and time spent elsewhere. Their stories are also richly diverse, ranging from Ernest Gaines’s humorous portrait of black culture in rural Louisiana to Tim Parrish’s aching depiction of white working-class family life in Baton Rouge, from Ellen Gilchrist’s acerbically funny rendering of wealthy New Orleans bankers to Richard Ford’s flinty unfolding of a father-son relationship in the marshy netherworld south of the Crescent City. The pieces span the full swath of Louisiana experience, be it the life of a Vietnamese refugee in Lake Charles or the miraculous appearance of the image of Jesus on a refrigerator in Holly Springs.In addition to their Louisiana-rooted inspiration and highest regard for craft, the stories in Wide Awake in the Pelican State share a deep humanity. These are stories about people—noble and nefarious, some living high and others down on their luck—as they fathom the tragic depths and comic heights of love, betrayal, family, change, and life writ large.

Contributors to Wide Awake in the Pelican State: John Biguenet, James Lee Burke, Robert Olen Butler, Kelly Cherry, Moira Crone, Albert Belisle Davis, Charles deGravelles, John Dufresne, Richard Ford, Ernest J. Gaines, Louis Gallo, Tim Gautreaux, Norman German, Ellen Gilchrist, Joan Arbour Grant, Shirley Ann Grau, Dinty W. Moore, Tim Parrish, Tom Piazza, Nancy Richard, James Wilcox.

LSU Press

The Mercy of Thin Air: A Novel

Ronlyn Domingue

In 1920s New Orleans, Raziela Nolan's magnificent love affair is interrupted by her untimely and tragic death. Immediately after, she chooses to stay between -- a realm that exists after life and before whatever lies beyond it. From this remarkable vantage point, Razi narrates the story of her lost love as well as of the relationship of Amy and Scott, a young couple whose house she haunts seventy years later. It is their own troubled story that finally compels Razi to slowly unravel the mystery of what happened to her first and only passion, Andrew, and to confront a long-hidden secret.

The Mercy of Thin Air entwines two heartbreaking and redemptive love stories that echo across three generations and culminate in a finish that will leave readers breathless. It is a poignant and brilliant first novel that beautifully captures the nature of love and shows how it transcends all barriers -- even death.

Atria

ISBN: 0-7432-7880-1, Hardcover $24.00

Alligator Sue

2006 Louisiana Young Readers' Choice Award Winner 

Grades 3-5

Sharon Arms Doucet

"All you can do is be who you is."

Suzanne Marie Sabine Chicot Thibodeaux (called Sue for short) lives on a houseboat deep in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Swamp. One lazy summer afternoon when the air grows heavier than a catfish's bath towel, a hurricane swoops Sue up -- only to drop her like a hot patate into the swamp below. Sue finds herself nose-to-snout with a queen-sized, prickly-backed mama Alligator. Luckily, Mama Coco is no ordinary gator. She invites Sue into her family and teaches her all she knows. Sue tries hard to be an alligator; still, every once in a while, she recalls a wisp of a familiar song and begins to wonder: Who am I -- a Gator or a Girl?

How this spirited heroine claims her identity and her name -- Alligator Sue -- makes a funny, affecting, and wise tale, illustrated with irresistible joie de vivre.

Praise:

"Wilsdorf's loose black line and watercolor wash make the girl's acceptance into the reptilian family seem plausible. . .A triumphant tale of finding one's way in the world." --Starred, Publisher's Weekly

"Doucet's text is a storyteller's delight, full of fun and with a sassy new heroine. Wilsdorf's energetic illustrations are masterfully embedded throughout the text, blowing the story along like pleasurable windy microbursts. Laissez les bon temps roulez." --Kirkus Reviews

"Doucet's ear for the Louisiana Jingo gives the story bounce and imagery abounds. . .Children will love this 'rich as pecan pralines' tale of spunky Sue." --School Library Journal

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Today is Monday in Louisiana

(Due out in October 2006)

Johnnette Downing

Pelican Publishing

Tubby Meets Katrina

Tony Dunbar

New Orleans attorney Tony Dunbar’s lawyer-turned-sleuth Tubby Dubonnet is back, and this time, the city of New Orleans itself is endangered. Just when Tubby thought it was safe to come back to New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina boils up a rich gumbo of trouble for the unsuspecting lawyer in Tubby Meets Katrina.

Tubby rides out the storm okay—but then the levees break, the city floods, and he and thousands of other refugees end up in the hellish Convention Center. In the chaos, Tubby’s daughter finds herself targeted by an escaped psychopath, one who envisions himself the human embodiment of the hurricane. With no law enforcement to rely upon, Tubby must use his wits and his connections to protect himself and his family while trying to restore his home and help bring his beloved city back to life.

This fast-paced story includes incisive vignettes of the dangerous days just after Katrina hit and of the frustrating weeks that followed. Dunbar himself had to flee New Oleans to escape the storm, bringing a unique personal touch to his depictions. Combining real events with startling suspense, Tubby Meets Katrina is an important novel for anyone gripped by the Gulf Coast tragedy.

NewSouth Books

America's Wetland: Louisiana's Vanishing Coast

Mike Dunne and Bevil Knapp

An affecting photo-essay that highlights America's land-loss crisis

With America's Wetland, award-winning photographer Bevil Knapp and veteran reporter Mike Dunne sound the clarion call of the catastrophic effects of Louisiana's vanishing coastline—not just for Louisiana but for the nation and the world. This vital landscape known as America's Wetland is currently disappearing at a rate of twenty-four square miles per year and could lose another five to seven hundred square miles in the next fifty years if no action is taken. New Orleans could become “America's Atlantis,” one of the country's unique cultures lost forever. Knapp's beautiful, sometimes startling photographs and Dunne's incisive commentary bring the urgency of this problem into full view.

Documented here is a way of life that is quickly waning. Fishermen, oyster farmers, cattle ranchers, oil industry workers, shipbuilders, and tugboat captains are all heavily dependent on Louisiana's coastal territory in bringing the people of the United States a host of products and services sometimes taken for granted. Home to nearly two million residents, the state's wetland serves as protection from hurricanes and storm surges and acts as a buffer for the city of New Orleans, identified by the National Hurricane Center as the city most threatened by the loss of America's Wetland.

The book makes clear that as coastal erosion in Louisiana worsens at an alarming rate, the nation's economic and energy security is put at ever-higher risk and the environmental repercussions become unthinkable. Aerial photographs show how the oil and gas infrastructure is becoming increasingly exposed to the Gulf. Wells, pipelines, ports, roads, and levees that are key to delivering energy to the nation have been made vulnerable. Louisiana wetlands are the natural nursery ground for much of the country's seafood and the wintering habitat for more than five million waterfowl and migratory birds. Stunning photographs of owls, pelicans, egret, crab, crawfish, and alligators illustrate the vast array of wildlife whose home—if not very survival—is endangered by the possible collapse of this intricate ecosystem.

America's Wetland not only maps the causes and effects of Louisiana's diminishing coast but also outlines restorative and conservation initiatives such as tree planting, rebuilding fisheries, and setting aside wildlife refuges. With the active support of all Americans, there is still hope that this imperiled border of the country can be saved.

LSU Press

Soulful Strut

(Due out in December 2006)

Lynn Emery

HarperTorch

Good Woman Blues

Lynn Emery

It didn't take much for Erikka Rochon's charmed Big Easy life to hit rock bottom: a car accident, a scandal -- and suddenly she's gone from climbing the corporate ladder to being driven out of town. Ordered to take some time off, an always-on-the-go sister now has nowhere to go, except back home to the bayou to slow down and figure out why a smart, beautiful, professional lady who always had time to party never found time for happiness.

Aunt Darlene's house was Erikka's safe haven in childhood, filled with good aromas and feelings, and a much-needed mixture of tenderness and tough love. But a good woman who lost her way needs something more to chase her demons and her blues -- and it might just be Gabriel Cormier, the tall, quiet son of Loreauville's most prominent family, a man with a past more notorious than hers.

HarperTorch

The Loss of Leon Meed: A Novel

Josh Emmons

In Josh Emmons's inventive and utterly engaging debut, ten residents of Eureka, California, are brought together by a mysterious man, Leon Meed, who repeatedly and inexplicably appears -- in the ocean, at a local rock music club, clinging to the roof of a barreling truck, standing in the middle of Main Street's oncoming traffic -- and then, as if by magic, disappears.

Young and old, married and single, punk and evangelical, black, white, and Korean, each witness to these bewildering events interprets them differently, yet all of their lives are changed -- by the phenomenon itself, and by what it provokes in them. And whether they in turn stagger toward love, or heartbreakingly dissolve it, Emmons's portrayal of their stories is strikingly real and emotionally affecting.

Scribner

ISBN: 0-7432-6718-4, Hardcover $24.00

Tom Fitzmorris's New Orleans Food: More than 225 of the City's Best Recipes to Cook at Home

Tom Fitzmorris

Tom Fitzmorris is uniquely qualified to write about the food of New Orleans. Born in the Crescent City on Mardi Gras, he'd never been away from his favorite town for more than three weeks at a time--that is, until Hurricane Katrina struck and Fitzmorris and his family were forced to evacuate. Prior to the disaster, Fitzmorris was putting the finishing touches on his magnum opus: a collection of recipes for the best of New Orleans food, gathered and developed over more than 30 years of reporting and eating in the Big Easy. In addition to his weekly restaurant review column, published continuously for 33 years, Fitzmorris is known for his radio program, The Food Show, aired every afternoon on WSMB. With New Orleans Food, Fitzmorris presents more than 225 great New Orleans recipes designed for the home cook, all steeped in the Creole and Cajon traditions yet updated to reflect contemporary tastes and ingredients. From small plates (Shrimp Remoulade with Two Sauces) to main courses (Redfish Herbsaint, Root Beer-Glazed Ham) to desserts and drinks (Beignets, Café au Lait), these dishes are both elegant and casual, traditional and evolved. Whether you are nostalgic for the taste of New Orleans or simply love good food, New Orleans Food should find a place on your cookbook shelf. Now every Monday, everywhere, can be red-beans-and-rice day. A portion of the profits from this book will be donated to Habitat for Humanity to aid in New Orleans recovery efforts.

Stewart, Tabori & Chang

The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine

Chef John D. Folse

Chef Folse's seventh cookbook is the authoritative collection on Louisiana's culture and cuisine. The book features more than 850 full-color pages, dynamic historical Louisiana photographs and more than 700 recipes. You will not only find step-by-step directions to preparing everything from a roux to a cochon de lait, but you will also learn about the history behind these recipes. Cajun and Creole cuisine was influenced by seven nations that settled Louisiana, from the Native Americans to the Italian immigrants of the 1800s. Learn about the significant contributions each culture made-okra seeds carried here by African slaves, classic French recipes recalled by the Creoles, the sausage-making skills of the Germans-and more. Relive the adventure and romance that shaped Louisiana, and recreate the recipes enjoyed in Cajun cabins, plantation kitchens and New Orleans restaurants.

Chef Folse has hand picked the recipes for each chapter to ensure the very best of seafood, game, meat, poultry, vegetables, salads, appetizers, drinks and desserts are represented. From the traditional to the truly unique, you will develop a new understanding and love of Cajun and Creole cuisine. The Encyclopedia would make a perfect gift or simply a treasured addition to your own cookbook library.

Chef John Folse & Company

Side Effects: A New Orleans Love Story

Patty Friedmann

Side Effects is a clever and complex love story set in New Orleans where three pharmacy employees, balance life, love, family, and prescriptions.

N.O. Drugstore is located at the improbable intersection of South Claiborne Avenue and South Carrollton Avenue in New Orleans. Its idiosyncratic clientele draws as much from the mostly poor-black Pigeontown as it does from the mostly rich-white University section. And no one knows this better than the three people who man the pharmacy on even days of the month. As different in style and temperament as their customers, Luciana Jambon, Lennon Israel, and Vendetta Greene are the protagonists of this story. Told in third person from their alternating points of view, Side Effects plays out their respective family feuds, usually somewhere between the Seasonal Specials and the Depends aisles. Corralled as they are with one another twelve hours a day, romance and splendid friendship blossom among Luciana, Lennon, and Vendetta, because it’s really only a low counter that separates them from everyone else.

Shoemaker & Hoard

Rampart Street

David Fulmer

As the third Storyville mystery begins, Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr has just returned to New Orleans. Having only recently solved the case of the jass murders, he is drawn reluctantly into the investigation of a new murder- that of a well-to-do gentleman on seedy Rampart Street. Then another wealthy society man turns up dead, and the detective learns that the two victims were acquainted years ago. In a spider's web of coincidence, the second murder has been witnessed-or has it?-by the man who's now keeping Justine, Valentin's old girlfriend, as his paramour. Valentin probes deeper even as the city's most powerful leaders pressure him to drop the investigation. What could he be getting close to, and what nerves might he unwittingly strike?

David Fulmer has created a heart-pounding mystery in this, his soulful detective's most dangerous case yet.

Harcourt Trade

ISBN: 0-15-101024-2, Hardcover $25.00

Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America

Marcia Gaudet

Personal accounts of life in America's last colony for sufferers of Hansen's disease

Mysterious and misunderstood, distorted by biblical imagery of disfigurement and uncleanness, Hansen's disease or leprosy has all but disappeared from America's consciousness. In Carville, Louisiana, the closed doors of the nation's last center for the treatment of leprosy open to reveal stories of sadness, separation, and even strength in the face of what was once a life-wrenching diagnosis.

Drawn from interviews with living patients and extensive research in the leprosarium's archives, Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America tells the stories of former patients at the National Hansen's Disease Center. For over a century, from 1894 until 1999, Carville was the site of the only in-patient hospital in the continental United States for the treatment of Hansen's disease, the preferred designation for leprosy.

Patients-exiled there by law for treatment and for separation from the rest of society-reveal how they were able to cope with the devastating blow the diagnosis of leprosy dealt them. Leprosy was so frightening and so poorly understood that entire families would suffer and be shunned if one family member contracted the disease. When patients entered Carville, they typically left everything behind, including their legal names and their hopes for the future.

Former patients at Carville give their views of the outside world and of the culture they forged within the treatment center, which included married and individual living quarters, a bar, and even a jail. Those quarantined in the leprosarium created their own Mardi Gras celebrations, their own newspaper, and their own body of honored stories in which fellow sufferers of Hansen's disease prevailed over trauma and ostracism. Through their memories and stories, we see their very human quest for identity and endurance with dignity, humor, and grace.

University of Mississippi Press

Dope

Sara Gran

A raw, explosive, genre-bending tour de force destined for comparison with Kate Atkinson's Case Histories and Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn

Josephine Flannigan should be dead by now. From an overdose, or a cop's bullet, or run down in some back alley. But after a childhood in Hell's Kitchen and a lifetime on drugs, by 1950 she's finally cleaned up her act and gotten out of trouble-or so she thinks.

Things start to look up for Josephine when a suburban couple offers her $1000 to help find their daughter, a Barnard student who's disappeared into the dark subculture of heroin addiction. But nothing is as simple as it seems. Joe's journey back into a world she thought she'd left behind becomes more vertiginous at every turn-a harrowing descent into deceit and manipulation that makes it impossible to distinguish friend from foe, and leads her to a choice that will haunt her to the end of her days.

Putnam

Michael Griffith

A scintillating new work of fiction by the author of Spikes, which the Houston Chronicle called “A devilish book, by turns gut-wrenching, philosophical, dazzlingly beautiful, and as hilarious as anything recently published.”

With the publication of his first novel, Spikes, Michael Griffith burst onto the literary scene, eliciting comparisons to Nabokov, Saul Bellow, and E. L. Doctorow. With this, his scintillating new work of fiction, he again proves that he is “one of the finest young writers in America” (Houston Chronicle).

In the title novella, Bibliophilia, the unlikely protagonist is a postmenopausal university librarian pressed into reluctant duty as a “sex cop,” whose job is to troll the stacks for students intent on illicit coupling among the classics. Her colleague at the circulation desk, an exchange student from Egypt, has come to the States to study hydrology but ends up learning far more about American sexual mores than his subject of choice.

The stories are equally zany and wide-ranging, with settings as diverse as southern Louisiana and Newark, New Jersey, and featuring, among others: a hair scientist who is going bald; an English professor trapped in a monkey cage; a mother who hands her toddler to a mugger while she rummages for money in her purse; a nightwatchman in a used-hubcap yard; and the owner of a landfill who is also the proud father of a teenage chess prodigy. What the fictions have in common is an astute mixture of comedy and pathos. Taking seemingly ludicrous premises, Griffith manages, in surprising ways, to render them poignant.

Arcade Publishing

Understanding Robert Penn Warren

James A. Grimshaw, Jr.

The literary achievements of the country's first poet laureate

Understanding Robert Penn Warren offers a comprehensive introduction to and commentary on the fiction, poetry, and drama of one of the twentieth century's most versatile writers and the first author to be honored as U.S. poet laureate. In this volume James A. Grimshaw, Jr., describes Warren's search for meaning in life and for a connection between self and others. Grimshaw examines the writer's views about the primacy of self-knowledge and explores the painful and arduous path his protagonists must follow to gain such knowledge and the interrelationship of his artistic endeavors, which were woven together by common thematic concerns—history, time, truth, responsibility, love, hope, and endurance.

Grimshaw presents an overview of Warren's life and his literary criticism, the latter offering a lens through which readers can gain a better understanding of Warren's fiction, poetry, and drama. In addition to providing thorough readings of Warren's fiction and poetry, Grimshaw explores Warren's little-examined contributions as a playwright. Grimshaw renders a fresh perspective on Warren's plays as he points out the profound influence of William Shakespeare, the impact of such nineteenth-century authors as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Hardy, and Warren's connection to such twentieth-century writers as T. S. Eliot and John Crowe Ransom.

Underscoring the poet laureate's extensive achievements in the realm of letters, Grimshaw discusses Warren's focus on the universal concerns of society. While proposing that Warren comes as close as any writer of his generation to presenting a synoptic view of the human condition, Grimshaw draws primary attention to Warren's storytelling ability—a talent he rates as Warren's greatest legacy.

University of South Carolina Press

Patriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte at the Battle of New Orleans

Winston Groom

From the author of best-selling works of history and fiction, a fast-paced, enthralling retelling of one of the greatest battles fought on the North American continent, and of the two men who—against all expectations and odds—joined forces to repel the British invasion of New Orleans in December 1814.

It has all the ingredients of a high-flying adventure story. Unbeknownst to the combatants, the War of l812 has ended, but Andrew Jackson, a brave, charismatic American general—sick with dysentery and commanding a beleaguered garrison—leads a desperate struggle to hold on to the city of New Orleans and to thwart the army that defeated Napoleon. Helping him is a devilish French pirate, Jean Laffite, who rebuffs a substantial bribe from the British and together with his erstwhile enemy saves the city from invasion . . . much to the grateful chagrin of New Orleanians shocked to find themselves on the same side as the brazen buccaneer. Winston Groom brings his considerable storytelling gifts to the re-creation of this remarkable battle and to the portrayal of its main players. Against the richly evocative backdrop of French New Orleans, he illuminates Jackson’s brilliant strategy and tactics, as well as the antics and cutthroat fighting prowess of Laffite and his men.

Patriotic Fire brings this extraordinary military achievement vividly to life.

Random House

The Year of Past Things

M. A. Harper

Award-winning chef Phil Randazzo, owner of the trendy Tasso Restaurant in New Orleans, and his new wife, Michelle, are as happy as can be. Michelle's kids, Cam and Nicole, want Phil to be their new father even though they still miss their first dad, A. P. Savoie, a popular Cajun musician who died in a car crash. But it's hard for Phil to concentrate because weird things are happening: The cat suddenly has the ability to walk through locked doors, and the ghost of A. P. Savoie appears at will. Savoie's presence becomes stronger and stronger until the couple asks for help- psychics, exorcists, and local "experts" are consulted, yet no one can save Phil from this pesky ghost. Phil knows that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, but he's not ready to meet his maker yet.

Harvest Books

ISBN: 0-15-602980-4, Paperback $14.00