New Orleans, Mon Amour
New Orleans, Mon Amour

Author: Andrei Codrescu

Publisher:

Published: 2006-01-31

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13:

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

New Orleans, Mon Amour
New Orleans, Mon Amour

Author: Andrei Codrescu

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2004-01-04

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1565127900

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A “lovely collection” of essays by the NPR commentator about his beloved adopted city, both before and after Hurricane Katrina (Publishers Weekly). NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has long written about the unique city he calls home. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his 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 pirates are palpable; and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu’s essays have been called “satirical gems,” “subversive,” “funny,” “gonzo,” and “wittily poignant”—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous 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, but here Codrescu also writes about how the city’s heart still beats even after 2005’s devastating hurricane. New Orleans, Mon Amour is a portrait of an incomparable place, from a writer who “manages to be brilliant and insightful, tough and seductive about American culture” (The New York Times Book Review). “Finely honed portraits of a fabled city and its equally fabled inhabitants. The author, who has called the Big Easy home for two decades, shows how, like some gigantic bohemian magnet, New Orleans attracts some of the world’s most talented, self-indulgent freaks. Codrescu finds himself quite at home there. He expertly weaves pages of New Orleans history through his stories of personal discovery and debauchery. . . . Readers can’t help coming away from reading it without an abiding hope in the ability of ordinary people, under the worst circumstances, rising to whatever challenges they face.” —Publishers Weekly

Three Hundred Years of Decadence
Three Hundred Years of Decadence

Author: Robert Azzarello

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0807170887

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New Orleans’s reputation as a decadent city stems in part from its environmental precariousness, its Francophilia, its Afro-Caribbean connections, its Catholicism, and its litany of alleged “vices,” encompassing prostitution, miscegenation, homosexuality, and any number of the seven deadly sins. An evocative work of cultural criticism, Robert Azzarello’s Three Hundred Years of Decadence argues that decadence can convey a more nuanced meaning than simple decay or decline conceived in physical, social, or moral terms. Instead, within New Orleans literature, decadence possesses a complex, even paradoxical relationship with concepts like beauty and health, progress, and technological advance. Azzarello presents the concept of decadence, along with its perception and the uneasy social relations that result, as a suggestive avenue for decoding the long, shifting story of New Orleans and its position in the transatlantic world. By analyzing literary works that span from the late seventeenth century to contemporary speculations about the city’s future, Azzarello uncovers how decadence often names a transfiguration of values, in which ideas about supposed good and bad cannot maintain their stability and end up morphing into one another. These evolving representations of a decadent New Orleans, which Azzarello traces with attention to both details of local history and insights from critical theory, reveal the extent to which the city functions as a contact zone for peoples and cultures from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Drawing on a deep and understudied archive of New Orleans literature, Azzarello considers texts from multiple genres (fiction, poetry, drama, song, and travel writing), including many written in languages other than English. His analysis includes such works of transcription and translation as George Washington Cable’s “Creole Slave Songs” and Mary Haas’s Tunica Texts, which he places in dialogue with canonical and recent works about the city, as well as with neglected texts like Ludwig von Reizenstein’s German-language serial The Mysteries of New Orleans and Charles Chesnutt’s novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C. With its careful analysis and focused scope, Three Hundred Years of Decadence uncovers the immense significance—historically, politically, and aesthetically—that literary imaginings of a decadent New Orleans hold for understanding the city’s position as a multicultural, transatlantic contact zone.

Etouffee, Mon Amour
Etouffee, Mon Amour

Author: Kerri McCaffety

Publisher: Pelican Publishing

Published:

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9781455603893

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This luxurious photography book on New Orleans restaurants celebrates the city's love affair with food. From the legendary Tujague's to the down-home Uglesich's, these beloved establishments are shown off in all their glory for residents and visitors alike. From the antebellum legacies of grand old restaurants like Antoine's, Commander's Palace, and Bruning's to the newcomers like Jacques-Imo's, Bayona, and Clancy's, not to mention the legion in between, the countless stories of establishments dedicated to the je ne sais quoi of dining form part of the essential history of New Orleans. This rich mix of history and evocative photographs documents an unparalleled majesty of the senses, a decadent revelry in the past, and the daily marking of pleasure. Kerri McCaffety is the first-place winner of the 1999 Society of American Travel Writers Lowell Thomas Award for a self-illustrated article. The New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association named McCaffetyis first book, Obituary Cocktail, Book of the Year for 1998. Her second book, The Majesty of the French Quarter, was called 'a vision to behold' by Gambit literary reviewer Julia Kamysz Lane, and 'easily one of the most handsome coffee table books in years' by the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger . The New Orleans Times-Picayune referred to her third book, The Majesty of St. Charles Avenue, as 'fit for royalty.' Her writing and photojournalism appear in publications including the Oxford American, Town and Country, Historic Traveler, Colonial Homes, Southern Accents, Travel Leisure, Metropolitan Home, and the Seattle Times.

Signposts in a Strange Land
Signposts in a Strange Land

Author: Walker Percy

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2000-04

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 9780312254193

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At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.

The Poetry Lesson
The Poetry Lesson

Author: Andrei Codrescu

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-12-11

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 0691178054

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"Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary "Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.

The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans
The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans

Author: Andrei Codrescu

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1995-05-15

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780312135706

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In twenty-six essays, Codrescu turns his skeptical, amused gaze to such topics as Plato's effect on American sex, the cultural meaning of Ed McMahon, baseball's literary underpinnings, his own conception in a Romanian darkroom, an cuisine under the Ceausescu dictatorship, as well as to larger subjects, including the suicide of communism, American culture and politics, and his adopted city of New Orleans.

The World That Made New Orleans
The World That Made New Orleans

Author: Ned Sublette

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1569765138

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STRONGNamed one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune. STRONGWinner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.STRONG STRONGAwarded the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for 2008. New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance. The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans's first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana's statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, &“rock the city.&” This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette's previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.

Buddy Stall's New Orleans
Buddy Stall's New Orleans

Author: Buddy Stall

Publisher: Pelican Publishing

Published: 1990-10-31

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9781455601622

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Sometimes unique, sometimes unusual, sometimes unbelievable, but always entertaining and historically accurate, Buddy Stall's New Orleans enlightens readers with little-known facts about the Crescent City-facts to relish and to share with friends as well as guests to the city. Who is buried in Metairie Cemetery? What is the Mystery Monument ? Did a meteorite really fall in Audubon Park? What is the most photographed statue in New Orleans? What dueling mayor killed a senator? What famous general lost his head in Jackson Square? Where did the Mardi Gras colors come from? Who was the only king of Mardi Gras to marry his queen? When was the first football game played in New Orleans? Find the answers to all of these intriguing questions and more in this delightfully humorous book. As Buddy Stall reveals his insider's knowledge on the history and sights of New Orleans, the reader will discover just what it is that makes the Crescent City one of the most interesting and exciting cities in the world. Through his writings, teaching assignments, radio and television appearances, guest lectures, and personal appearances, Gaspar J. ( Buddy ) Stall has taught the history of Louisiana to more people than any other person in the state. One of the most sought-after speakers in Louisiana, Buddy Stall has captivated thousands with his delightful talks, proving his assertion that New Orleans' and Louisiana's history is much more entertaining than fiction. Stall, who is vice president of sales and public relations director for Radiofone, is the author of Mardi Gras and Bacchus: Something Old, Something New, also published by Pelican. He has been a contributing writer to many publications, including Citibusiness, New Orleans Magazine, the Italian American Federation Journal, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Baton Rouge Advocate.

Heart Like Water
Heart Like Water

Author: Joshua Clark

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-07-10

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 141654528X

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Try it. Right now. Picture the lights going off in the room you're sitting in. The computer, the air conditioning, phones, everything. Then the people, every last person in your building, on the street outside, the entire neighborhood, vanished. With them go all noises: chitchat, coughs, cars, and that wordless, almost impalpable hum of a city. And animals: no dogs, no birds, not even a cricket's legs rubbing together, not even a smell. Now bump it up to 95 degrees. Turn your radio on and listen to 80 percent of your city drowning. You're almost there. Only twenty-eight days to go. Joshua Clark never left New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, choosing instead to band together with fellow holdouts in the French Quarter, pooling resources and volunteering energy in an effort to save the city they loved. When Katrina hit, Clark, a key correspondent for National Public Radio during the storm, immediately began to record hundreds of hours of conversations with its victims, not only in the city but throughout the Gulf: the devastated poor and rich alike; rescue workers from around the country; reporters; local characters who could exist nowhere else but New Orleans; politicians; the woman Clark loved, in a relationship ravaged by the storm. Their voices resound throughout this memoir of a unique and little-known moment of anarchy and chaos, of heartbreaking kindness and incomprehensible anguish, of mercy and madness as only America could deliver it. Paying homage to the emotional power of Joan Didion, the journalistic authority of Norman Mailer, and the gonzo irreverence of Tom Wolfe, Joshua Clark takes us through the experiences of loss and renewal, resilience and hope, in a city unlike any other. With lyrical sympathy, humility, and humor, Heart Like Water marks an astonishing and important national debut. A portion of the author's royalties from this book will go to the Katrina Arts Relief and Emergency Support (KARES) fund, which supports New Orleans-area writers affected by the storm.Visit www.NewOrleansLiteraryInstitute.com to find out how to make a direct and positive impact on the region.