Beneath the glitter of Mardi Gras lies the sleaze of Bourbon Street;
under the celestial sounds of JazzFest, the nightmare screams of a city
once at war within its neighborhoods, but after Hurricane Katrina,
seemingly at war with nature and the rest of the country as well. New
Orleans is a third world country in itself, a Latin, African, European
(and often amoral) culture trapped in a Puritan nation. It's everyone's
seamy underside, the city where respectable citizens go to get drunk,
puke in the gutter, dance on tabletops, and go home with strangers, all
without guilt. It's the metropolitan equivalent of eating standing
up--if it happened in New Orleans, it doesn't count. The city was always
the home of the lovable rogue, the poison magnolia, the bent politico,
the sociopathic street thug, and, especially, the heartless con
artist--but in post-Katrina times it struggles against... well, the same
old problems, just writ large and with a new breed of carpetbagger
thrown in. Combine all that with a brilliant literary tradition and you
have New Orleans Noir, a sparkling collection of tales exploring the
city's wasted, gutted neighborhoods, its outwardly gleaming "sliver by
the river," its still-raunchy French Quarter, and other hoods so far
from the Quarter they might as well be on another continent. It also
looks back into the past, from that recent innocent time known in
contemporary New Orleans as "pre-K," to the mid-nineteenth century, the
other time the city was mostly swampland.
The complete list of narrators includes: Allyson Johnson, Vikas Adam,
Kevin T. Collins, Tom Stechschulte, Robin Miles, Jennifer Van Dyck,
Johnny Heller, Lisa Renee Pitts, William Dufris, Kevin Free, Nick
Sullivan, Therese Plummer, Mirron Willis, J. W. Wilburn, Lauren
Fortgang, Raquel Lozano, Andy Caploe, and Aiello.
