A city of books as much as a capital of music and culture, our round-up of the best literature about the Big Easy has been filled out with readers’ recommendations. Here are some of the best
The Tennesee Williams New Orleans literary festival is over for another year, but we’re still in a New Orleans state of mind – and we will be indefinitely, with such a great list to keep us reading. As the famous writer and playwright himself said: “America only has three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is just Cleveland.” While we’re not sure what other important cities might want to say about this, in terms of literature the Big Easy is certainly up there. After Susan Larson took us through her essential books about the city – from Streetcar to A Confederacy of Dunces – we turned to our readers to complete the list. Here are some of their recommendations. If your favourite is missing, do add it in the comments.
The city atmosphere certainly has improved her. Some way she doesn’t seem like the same woman.
The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.
I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.
A brilliantly imagined early novel about Buddy Bolden and the early days of jazz in New Orleans.
It was a music that had so little wisdom you wanted to clean nearly every note he passed, passed it seemed along the way as if travelling in a car, passed before he even approached it and saw it properly. There was no control except the mood of his power … and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play on recordings.
The right ending is an open door you can’t see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.
James Sallis’s brilliant six-book Lew Griffin series is set in New Orleans (mostly) but it’s less the city and more the soul of a man. Best to read that series in order.
In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. The only help you’ll get is a few hard drinks and morning.
from The Long-Legged Fly
I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. [...] A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding that we have in dreams , that I had just glimpsed one possible future self. ”
from Black Hornet
His eyes were a curious mixture of innocent and knowing, like a naive character who’s just happened to see too much.
The American Way is innocence. […] In all situations we must and shall display an innocence so vast and awesome that the entire world will be reduced by it. American innocence shall rise in mighty clouds of vapor to the scent of heaven and confound the nations!
Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.
“I don’t know what kind of great I’m bound to be,” Dove considered his prospects calmly, “all I know for certain is I’m born a world-shaker.”
If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm.
Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.
It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and aggressive, like the thunder lizards; a lesson, by the way, that the Earth has yet to learn.
Sublette’s book is required reading if you want to know the history of the city. But be prepared for difficult truths.
A brilliant piece of post-Katrina reportage that traces the city’s recent history through nine interwoven narratives ranging from a Mardi Gras Indian to a city cop, transsexual barkeep, and Carnival king.
That was the point of Mardi Gras, was it not? To serve and honor all the people, to bring into hard lives a touch of royalty and grandeur … To put on a spectacle such as this, free of charge, was an honor. New Orleans was sick and wounded, but no other city in the world had a celebration quite like this. It was beautiful precisely because it was so frivolous.
In New Orleans, no matter how much money you had in the bank, you looked on poverty every day.
New Orleanians are notoriously late showing up, if they show up at all, because by and large they don’t keep calendars. Calendars are tools for managing the future, and in New Orleans the future doesn’t exist.
Life in New Orleans is all about making the present – this moment, right now – as pleasant as possible. So New Orleanians, by and large, aren’t tortured by the frenzy to achieve, acquire, and manage the unmanageable future.
Didn’t he have to admit, begrudgingly, that in some extra-perverse corner of his brain the idea of having to be out of town before sundown appealed to him? New Orleans had been the only constant thing in his life. But didn’t he get an itchy foot sometimes, didn’t he sometimes think about just throwing all his stuff in his car and going?
Of course he did. Everybody did, even normal people, the ones with triple mortgages and orthodontists’ bills and responsibilities to everything except what they really wanted.
from Drawing Blood
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