New Orleans Mon Amour

Download or read book New Orleans, Mon Amour written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2004-01-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Three Hundred Years of Decadence written by Robert Azzarello and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Hiroshima Mon Amour written by Marguerite Duras and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning screenplay for the classic film the New York Post hailed as “overwhelming . . . a motion picture landmark.” One of the most influential works in the history of cinema, Alain Renais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour gathered international acclaim upon its release in 1959 and was awarded the International Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics’ Award. Ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a stunning exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and inhumanity.

Download or read book The World That Made New Orleans written by Ned Sublette and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Signposts in a Strange Land written by Walker Percy and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-04 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Signposts in a Strange Land written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writings on the South, Catholicism, and more from the National Book Award winner: “His nonfiction is always entertaining and enlightening” (Library Journal). Published just after Walker Percy’s death, Signposts in a Strange Land takes readers through the philosophical, religious, and literary ideas of one of the South’s most profound and unique thinkers. Each essay is laced with wit and insight into the human condition. From race relations and the mysteries of existence, to Catholicism and the joys of drinking bourbon, this collection offers a window into the underpinnings of Percy’s celebrated novels and brings to light the stirring thoughts and voice of a giant of twentieth century literature.

Download or read book Etouffee, Mon Amour written by Kerri McCaffety and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.