Stay Out Of New Orleans

Stay Out of New Orleans: Strange Tales A crass tour of feral street life in New Orleans in the 1990's. A lucid walk through the shadows of North America's best and weirdest city, a place that bewitches some visitors and infects others. A bohemia stretching back to the dawn of absinthe. A town of hidden doors, hidden courtyards, and open secrets. Each day a fresh crime eager to happen, transcendent, fertile. Death lurking in every bar. No one knew it was a golden age............ See what the flood washed away... Self published in 2012, Stay Out of New Orleans has become an underground New Orleans cult classic and has gone on to sell a couple of thousand copies strictly by word of mouth and carried in but a couple of local stores. Now re-designed and re-formatted these 13 stories of NOLA 1990's street life will continue to find a new audience of readers-those both enchanted and those repelled by the city.

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.

This volume examines the rebuilding of cities and their environs after a disaster and focuses on four major issues: making cities less vulnerable to disaster, reestablishing economic viability, responding to the permanent needs of the displaced, and recreating a sense of place.

With a style the Los Angeles Times calls as "vivid and fast-moving as the music he loves," Ned Sublette's powerful new book drives the reader through the potholed, sinking streets of the United States's least-typical city. In this eagerly awaited follow-up to The World That Made New Orleans, Sublette's award-winning history of the Crescent City's colonial years, he traces an arc of his own experience, from the white supremacy of segregated 1950s Louisiana through the funky year of 2004–2005--the last year New Orleans was whole. By turns irreverent, joyous, darkly comic, passionate, and polemical, The Year Before the Flood juxtaposes the city's crowded calendar of parties, festivals, and parades with the murderousness of its poverty and its legacy of racism. Along the way, Sublette opens up windows of American history that illuminate the present: the trajectory of Mardi Gras from pre–Civil War days, the falsification of Southern history in movies, the city's importance to early rock and roll, the complicated story of its housing projects, the uniqueness of its hip-hop scene, and the celebratory magnificence of the participatory parades known as second lines. With a grand, unforgettable cast of musicians and barkeeps, scholars and thugs, vibrating with the sheer excitement of New Orleans, The Year Before the Flood is an affirmation of the power of the city's culture and a heartbreaking tale of loss that definitively establishes Ned Sublette as a great American writer for the 21st century.

Hurricane Katrina inflicted damage on a scale unprecedented in American history, nearly destroying a major city and killing thousands of its citizens. With far too little help from indifferent, incompetent government agencies, the poor bore the brunt of the disaster. The residents of traditionally impoverished and minority communities suffered incalculable losses and endured unimaginable conditions. And the few facilities that did exist to help victims quickly became miserable, dangerous places. Now, the victims of Hurricane Katrina find themselves spread across the United States, far from the homes they left and faced with the prospect of starting anew. Families are struggling to secure jobs, homes, schools, and a sense of place in unfamiliar surroundings. Meanwhile, the rebuilding of their former home remains frustrating out of their hands. This bracing read brings readers to the heart of the disaster and its aftermath as those who survived it speak with candor and eloquence of their lives then and now.