Sothern, a death penalty lawyer who with his wife, photographer Nikki Page, arrived in New Orleans four years ahead of Katrina, delivers a haunting, personal, and quintessentially American story.

In the years since Hurricane Katrina, the modern-day bohemians of New Orleans have found themselves forced to the edges of poverty by the new tourist economy. Modeling his work after George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, the sociologist and ethnographer Peter J. Marina explores this unfamiliar side of the gentrifying “new” New Orleans. In 1920s Paris, Orwell witnessed an influx of locals and outsiders seeking authenticity while struggling to live with bourgeois society. Marina finds a similar ambivalence in New Orleans: a tourism-dependent city whose commerce caters largely to well-heeled natives and upper-class travelers, where many creative locals and wanderers have remained outsiders, willingly or otherwise. Marina does not merely interview these spirited urban misfits—he lives among them. Down and Out in New Orleans follows their journeys, depicting the lives of those on the social fringes of a resilient city. Marina finds work as a bartender, street mime, and poet. Along the way, he visits homeless shelters, squats in abandoned buildings, attends rituals in cemeteries, and befriends writers, musicians, occultists, and artists as they look for creative solutions to the contradictory demands of late capitalism. Marina does for New Orleans what Orwell did for Paris a century earlier, providing a rigorous, unrelenting, and original glimpse into the subcultures of a city in rapid change.

Song for My Fathers is the story of a young white boy driven by a consuming passion to learn the music and ways of a group of aging black jazzmen in the twilight years of the segregation era. Contemporaries of Louis Armstrong, most of them had played in local obscurity until Preservation Hall launched a nationwide revival of interest in traditional jazz. They called themselves “the mens.” And they welcomed the young apprentice into their ranks. The boy was introduced into this remarkable fellowship by his father, an eccentric Southern liberal and failed novelist whose powerful articles on race had made him one of the most effective polemicists of the early Civil Rights movement. Nurtured on his father’s belief in racial equality, the aspiring clarinetist embraced the old musicians with a boundless love and admiration. The narrative unfolds against the vivid backdrop of New Orleans in the 1950s and ‘60s. But that magical place is more than decor; it is perhaps the central player, for this story could not have taken place in any other city in the world.

Sibert Honor Medalist ∙ Kirkus' Best of 2015 list ∙ School Library Journal Best of 2015 ∙ Publishers Weekly's Best of 2015 list ∙ Horn Book Fanfare Book ∙ Booklist Editor's Choice On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina's monstrous winds and surging water overwhelmed the protective levees around low-lying New Orleans, Louisiana. Eighty percent of the city flooded, in some places under twenty feet of water. Property damages across the Gulf Coast topped $100 billion. One thousand eight hundred and thirty-three people lost their lives. The riveting tale of this historic storm and the drowning of an American city is one of selflessness, heroism, and courage--and also of incompetence, racism, and criminality. Don Brown's kinetic art and as-it-happens narrative capture both the tragedy and triumph of one of the worst natural disasters in American history. A portion of the proceeds from this book has been donated to Habitat for Humanity New Orleans.

A memoir from the land planning and urban policy management authority, and sixth-generation member of an influential New Orleans family.

Lincoln in New Orleans reconstructs, to levels of detail and analyses never before attempted, the nature of Lincoln's two flatboat journeys to New Orleans and examines their influence on Lincoln's life, presidency, and subsequent historiography. It also sheds light on river commerce and New Orleans in the antebellum era.

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.

Niyi Osundare, one of Africa's most prominent poets and resident of New Orleans, La was one of the many whose life was caught in the destructive force of hurricane Katrina. Rescued by a neighbor with a boat, losing all that he had, exiled without even an identification to several states, he returned to rebuild his life and house. Written over the last five years, these poems recount both his loss and a thank you to those who helped.

Counting is Fun, and You'll Love Counting Around New Orleans, Louisiana!