“The Oyster Diaries,” by Nancy Lemann, New York Review Book, 240 pages “The doom” is thankfully over. That’s the phrase New Orleans writer Nancy Lemann has used to describe the past two decades, a seemingly productive period that has — blame the big-house... See more
“The Hospital at the End of the World,” by Justin C. Key, Harper, 400 pages. Book critics rarely, if ever, write about book covers. That task, perhaps, is the domain of designers, artists and publicists. It’s what’s between the covers that matters. But th... See more
“The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs,” by Beth Ann Fennelly, Norton, 144 pages. I love authors that swerve, those multi-talented multihyphenates. Case in point, Beth Ann Fennelly, who started as a poet, publishing three collections of personal, frequently hu... See more
“Beasts of Carnaval” by Rosália Rodrigo, Mira Books, 400 pages, and “Carnaval Fever” by Yuliana Ortiz Ruano, Soft Skull Press, 256 pages. Confined to our own Carnival bubble that is Mardi Gras, it’s often easy to forget that, in scattered places throughou... See more
“Pinchback: America’s First Black Governor” by Nicholas Patler, University Press of Mississippi, 226 pages. As late as the 1970s, Louisiana history textbooks excluded P.B.S. Pinchback’s name from the list of state governors. Hardly mere oversight, the lif... See more
