Susan Larson has established herself as the most visible individual guide to literary New Orleans. A new edition of her compendium, The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans, has just been released, offering updates to its takes on New Orleans …
Room 220
The New Jim Crow
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. The New Press, 2010. $19.95, 336 pages.
{Michelle Alexander will present her work at an event beginning at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 2, in …
Refugee Hotel
{From Press Street’s Room 220}
All images by Gabriele Stabile from Refugee Hotel
Refugees granted asylum in the United States arrive through only a handful of cities. They often spend the first night in their new country at a …
Honor the Stories: An Interview with Daniel Wolff
{From Press Street’s Room 220}
Writer Daniel Wolff came to New Orleans five months after Hurricane Katrina with filmmaker Jonathan Demme, not knowing what they’d find. They were told the story was over, that all the “good shots” had …
No One Lines Up That Simply
{From Press Street’s Room 220}
Sheila Heti’s third book, How Should a Person Be? is about Sheila. The character is a Toronto-based writer grappling with a play she can’t seem to finish, stuck in a marriage that stifles her. …
Rachel Kushner: I’m not sure there is a clear distinction between “to communicate” and “to monologue”
{From Press Street’s Room 220}
Like any historical novel—even one set in recent history—Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is a convergence of the past and the present, the time before now rendered with the help of research but intrinsically influenced …
John Glassie
{From Press Street’s Room 220}
Athanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit and self-styled “master of a hundred arts,” is credited with inventing the megaphone, a pre-cursor to the computer, and (perhaps) a cat piano. His intense curiosity about the …
Nathaniel Rich: None of the Bad News is Made Up
{From Press Street’s Room 220}
Someone quipped at last weekend’s Tennessee Williams Festival that Nathaniel Rich’s new novel, Odds Against Tomorrow (FSG, 2013), was the best Katrina book set in New York City. This observation conceals a degree of …
Daniel Brook: St. Petersburg was a Disneyland
{From Press Street’s Room 220}
Built as windows to the West, the cities of St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai each represent the “instant city” of their region—created by the will of a few, yet wielding an outsized influence …
Veronica Kavass: Artists in Love
{From Press Street’s Room 220}
Portrait of Kavass (and animal) by Anthony Scarlati
Veronica Kavass will present her new book, Artists in Love: From Picasso & Gilot to Christo & Jeanne-Claude, A Century of Creative and Romantic Partnerships, at …
