Recommended Books

You can fill many bookcases with New Orleans literature and authors, so the following list is just considered a starter kit. Get more recommendations at Faulkner House Books or The Garden District Book Shop.

General Fiction -- There are many examples of early fiction that give a good flavor of old-time New Orleans life. George Washington Cable's stories and novels are revealing and colorful; the collection to read is Old Creole Days (1879). Grace King answered Cable's not-always-flattering portrait of the Creoles in her short stories and in her novel The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard (1916). Perhaps the best writer to touch on the lives of the earliest Creoles is Kate Chopin, who lived in Louisiana for only 14 years in the late 19th century, first in New Orleans and later in Cloutierville. Many of her short stories and novels, the most famous of which is The Awakening, are set in the region or involve characters from here.

Frances Parkinson Keyes lived on Chartres Street for more than 25 years. Her most famous works are Dinner at Antoine's and Madame Castel's Lodger, and each has curious descriptions of life in the city at that time, along with excellent descriptions of food.

Ellen Gilchrist is a nationally recognized contemporary fiction writer with roots in the city. In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, a collection of her short stories, portrays life in wealthy uptown New Orleans. Sheila Bosworth's wonderful tragicomedies perfectly sum up the city and its collection of characters -- check out Almost Innocent or Slow Poison, two of our all-time favorite books. Valerie Martin's The Great Divorce is a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde set in the streets of antebellum New Orleans. Other possibilities are Nancy Levin's delightful Lives of the Saints and John Gregory Brown's critically acclaimed Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery. Michael Ondaatje's controversial Coming Through Slaughter is a fictionalized account of Buddy Bolden and the early New Orleans jazz era.

Poppy Z. Brite, a New Orleans native who originally gained fame via horror tales, has since turned her talents to a series of comic novels set in the New Orleans restaurant world. Stuffed full of NOLA (and the chef biz) verisimilitude, Liquor, Prime, and Soul Kitchen (with at least two more to come) are hilarious odes to an eccentric town and the people who work very hard to help us eat so well there.

Many of the recent books by poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu contain pieces about his adopted city of New Orleans. Codrescu has captured the city's appeal better than anyone else in recent times -- we've used quotes from him liberally throughout this text. Start with New Orleans, Mon Amour (Algonquin Books, 2006) and go from there.

And then, of course, there is the cottage industry known as Anne Rice. Whatever you might think of her writing skills, she loves her native city and does an arguably underrated job of capturing its essence. (More than one person has come to New Orleans just because he or she fell in love with it from one of Rice's books.) Her Vampire Chronicles, set in New Orleans, are her best-known works, but the city plays a significant (and seductive) role in The Witching Hour and is the backdrop for a historical novel, the well-researched Feast of All Saints, about the free people of color in 19th-century New Orleans.

History -- Lyle Saxon's Fabulous New Orleans is the most charming place to start learning about the city's past. (Saxon was director of the writer's program under the WPA.) From there, move on to his collaboration with Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya. Roark Bradford's Civil War novel, Kingdom Coming, contains a lot of information about voodoo. Mark Twain visited the city often in his riverboat days, and his Life on the Mississippi has a good number of tales about New Orleans and its riverfront life. The WPA Guide to New Orleans also contains some excellent social and historical background and provides a fascinating picture of the city in 1938. Beautiful Crescent, by Joan Garvey and Mary Lou Widmer, is a readable reference book on the history of New Orleans. Those who loved Gangs of New York will be pleased to learn Herbert Asbury gave the same (which is to say, highly entertaining and not terribly factual) treatment to New Orleans in The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld. New Orleans's favorite patroness, the Baroness de Pontalba, gets the biography treatment in Christina Velba's Intimate Enemies.

There are many guides to Mardi Gras. The definitive account is Henri Schindler's Mardi Gras New Orleans. Schindler produced balls and parades for Mardi Gras for 20 years and is considered carnival's foremost historian. Mardi Gras in New Orleans: An Illustrated History is a concise history of the celebration from ancient times to 2001. It was produced by Mardi Gras Guide publisher Arthur Hardy.

Literature -- William Faulkner came to New Orleans, lived on Pirates Alley, and penned Soldier's Pay. Several other Faulkner novels and short stories are set in New Orleans. Tennessee Williams became a devoted New Orleans fan, living in the city on and off for many years. It inspired him to write A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the best-known New Orleans tales. He also set The Rose Tattoo in the city.

Other notable New Orleans writers include Walker Percy and Shirley Ann Grau. Percy's novels, including The Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins, are classic portrayals of the idiosyncrasies of New Orleans and its residents. Grau's most famous novel, The Keepers of the House, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964. John Kennedy Toole also received a Pulitzer, but he wasn't around to know about it, having committed suicide years before. At the time of his death, none of his works had even been published. Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is a timeless New Orleans tragicomedy that'll have you laughing out loud.

Robert Penn Warren's classic novel All the King's Men, an exceedingly loose telling of the story of Huey P. Long, makes the list because it's so good, it gives a portrait of the performance art known as Louisiana politics, and because the 2006 movie adaptation was mostly shot in New Orleans.

A further notable modern writer is Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer in 1993 for his collection of stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, set primarily in New Orleans's Vietnamese community.

Post-Katrina Literature -- It's become a cottage industry already, but just because books have appeared quickly doesn't mean they were produced in haste. There are so many, but the following help give a picture of pre- and post-flood New Orleans, in direct response to the disaster. Tom Piazza's Why New Orleans Matters (Regan Books, 2005) is a love letter to and about the city, reminding all who love it why they do and encouraging a similar love in novices. Rosemary James, of Faulkner House bookstore, edited My New Orleans (Touchstone, 2006), a collection of essays by locals ranging from writers to restaurateurs and raconteurs, attempting to pin down just what it is about this place that keeps them here, come hell or high water. Local historian Douglas Brinkley's meticulous The Great Deluge (William Morrow, 2006) may not end up the definitive postmortem examination of Katrina, but it will be hard to top. Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose collected his heartbreaking personal essays, written as he and his colleagues covered their flooded city, in 1 Dead in Attic (CR Books, 2006).

Books About Music -- We highly recommend Ann Allen Savoy's Cajun Music Vol. 1 (Bluebird Press, 1984), a combination songbook and oral history. It features previously untranscribed Cajun music with lyrics in French (including a pronunciation guide) and English. A labor of many years, it's an invaluable resource.

For a look at specific time periods, people, and places in the history of New Orleans jazz, you have a number of choices. They include William Carter's Preservation Hall (Norton, 1991); John Chilton's Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1988); Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford University Press, 1968); Jazz, New Orleans (Da Capo Press, 1983), by Samuel Charters; New Orleans Jazz: A Revised History, by R. Collins (Vantage Press, 1996); Music in New Orleans (Louisiana State University Press, 1966), by Henry Kmen; In Search of Buddy Bolden (Louisiana State University Press, 1978), by Donald Marquis; New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album (Louisiana State University Press, 1967), by Al Rose and Edmond Souchon; New Orleans Style, by Bill Russell (Jazzology Press, 1994); and Jazz Masters of New Orleans, by Martin Williams (Da Capo Press, 1979). Al Rose's Storyville, New Orleans (University of Alabama Press, 1974) is an excellent source of information about the very beginnings of jazz.

If you prefer primary sources, read Louis Armstrong's Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (Da Capo Press, 1986) and Sidney Bechet's Treat It Gentle (Da Capo Press, 1960).