Who Dat? Oh my, thank you, thank you, thank you the Saints won. I apologize to all you Indianapolis fans, but C'mon I'm a Rams guy so feel mypain. But the Saints victory means a much better week at work for me, as my boss is a New Orleans native and so worked up in the weeks leading into the game that a loss would've surely meant misery for myself and everyone toiling alongside me.
In the immediate wake of Katrina I was on a conference call with the district's managers for the company I was working for and we were informed that we would be absorbing displaced employees out of N.O. some temporarily and others in a permanent migration. It seemed everyone I knew had ties to the city and region that I was previously unaware of.
Okay, so everybody knows Anne Rice is from The Big Easy, but for anybody looking to soak up a little more Louisiana region, check these out.
Barry Gifford first came to my attention as the guy who wrote the novel Wild at Heart that David Lynch’s film was based on, (he collaborated again with Lynch on Hotel Room and Lost Highway). The film was full of fantastic dialogue taken straight from the book and it turns out he’s written several more volumes in the Sailor and Lula saga. And while they're not all strictly N.O. based, the flavor of the region permeates the whole saga. His stories are as beautifully rendered and suddenly violent as the landscape, swinging hard from the tones of high pulp to a lush lyricism rarely equaled on the page.
In the next few years you’re probably going to know Daniel Woodrell’s name from a slew of movies now in various stages of development, (the first coming is Winter’s Bone which just grabbed some serious attention at the Sundance Film Festival). He is best known as the voice of Ozark outlaws, but he wrote a trilogy of Louisiana novels around his police detective Rene Shade in the eighties. Look for some long overdue reprints of Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister from Busted Flush Press in the next year, but in the meantime check out Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and (my favorite of the three) The Ones You Do .
Akashic books’ City Noir series includes a New Orleans Noir stop for those looking for a snapshot tour of the city’s dark corridors in short stories.
And for those displaced natives of New Orleans and the region, I highly recommend Anthony Neil Smith’s Yellow Medicine about a dirtyish cop from Mississippi exiled to Minnesota after his actions during the chaos of Katrina get him kicked off the force. Billy Laffitte jumps off right the page and straight up your nose, the most compelling anti-hero since The Shield’s Vic Mackey. Those inclined toward sympathy for this devil would do well to check up the follow up, last year’s sorely overlooked, Hogdoggin' .
Hmmm. Seems like I’m leaving out something obvious, but congratulations to the Saints (and the sinners) of a great American city. And thank god my week at work will be tolerable. Maybe even pleasant, who knows?
What are your favorite book and authors from The Big Easy?
