In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses...

Every town has ‘THAT house’: the one that once held dark secrets. You know the house… the one no one will purchase? The one whose walls have seen blood? The one that even birds avoid,...

He pulled out handcuffs and snapped them around my wrists. “Where’s your bag? You didn’t bring your staff?””I have it. It’s hidden.” Charlie was currently tucked inside the leg of my Harry Potter pajama bottoms,...

She had been used to the heat of New Orleans for so many years, and she found La Jolla cold.

Another site of Leftist struggle [other than Detroit] that has parallels to New Orleans: Palestine. From the central role of displacement to the ways in which culture and community serve as tools of resistance, there...

We’d all mourn for a while, but at the end of the day we were a tough lot, and we’d survive.

It seemed some pulp-novel version of a European hub, equal parts Renaissance-age Florence and modern day Paris with a heavy helping of Las Vegas and New York—at least, that was the way she thought of...

Am I right in thinkin’ you’ve maybe been” – he dropped his voice – “the victim of an infamous outrage by the darkies?

I really missed being in New Orleans, but I’m one of the lucky ones.

From my friend, Brig. General Ezell Ware, Jr., CA Nat’l Guard, Dec.Keep on going till you get there, then keep going.

She had understood before she had ever dreamed of a city such as this, where every texture, every color, leapt out at you, where every fragrance was a drug, and the air itself was something...

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping...

We walked the length of Jackson Square, stopping to look at the work of a couple of artists who’d set up their sidewalk shops for the day.”Look.” Eugenie stopped in front of an acrylic painting...

There’s been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years.

I didn’t really understand community until I moved to New Orleans.

And something just flew past your window. It was oinking.

A huge section of the U.S. economy is down. It’s as complicated as the rescue efforts in New Orleans; it’s all these different pieces. You have to get electricity restored, find out where your employees...

You’ll be in good hands with the colonel, you’ll see.”The colonel? Okay, I was obviously stuck in a Gone With the Wind theme park. Or maybe a Kentucky Fried Chicken farm.Or I was simply hallucinating…

That’s where the deceased chose to reside and that is where he will be placed.” Kekaju and the Hidden Swamp

Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it’s as if the audience–dancing, singing to the...

You can’t fight a war in Iraq that’s costing upwards of $200 billion and rebuild New Orleans and try to deal with all of the other domestic needs that we have and then cut taxes...

the watery graveyard that is New Orleans.

She shook her head. “I can’t believe you got bit and you didn’t even get an orgasm out of it. I guess True Blood isn’t true after all.

God loves New Orleans, He loves Louisiana?this whole Gulf region, God loves you.

Damn. I never should have agreed to this. What is he thinking? Here we are in a piece of crap pickup truck on our way to sit outside of a supermarket to kidnap this girl....

Jean Laffite was a sexy bad boy with a gentleman’s manners and an air of barely suppressed danger. Every girl’s secret dreamboat in other words. We always say we want a nice, hardworking, decent guy...

..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media’s characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience...

Tell me, Mrs. Moon, will your need for sustenance trouble you on this excursion? How often do you need to feed?” I couldn’t tell whether his interest was scientific, or whether he was afraid I...

Could you just imagine? If every suicide rose–think of Faulkner’s Quentin Compson as a vampire. I don’t hate the South I don’t I don’t. She wondered how they’d have worked it out in Cambridge when...

Not only is the city at risk, but the culture is at risk. This might be the last generation to see how New Orleans was.

Whoever was in charge of planning was so detached from the realities of inner city life in New Orleans … that they couldn’t conceive of the notion that they couldn’t load up their SUVs, put...

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists…but it is better to live...

Alex leaned over and treated me to a Rhett Butler kiss, slow and deep but not too sweet. He once told Scarlett something to the effect of how badly she needed kissing, and by someone...

Buddy ran down the road, turned into another street, and vanished as if he had never been there, like another ghost from New Orleans’s past.

Look, we’re in the boonies. I am sure shoes are optional, as are a full set of teeth.

I always hated it when TV reporters stuck a microphone in the faces of people who’d just lost a home or a loved one, wanting to know how they felt. They felt like shit. They...

The millions of vacationers who came here every year before Katrina were mostly unaware of this poverty. French Quarter tourists were rarely exposed to the reality beneath the Disneyland Gomorrah that is projected as ‘N’Awlins,’...

Was I altering the ‘space-time continuum’ or whatever they called it in time travel movies, just by existing right now? Perhaps I’d accidentally kill a mosquito that might have given some famous person a disease...

Time seemed to drag with dreamlike slowness, like a knife through cold honey, and the room took on a surreal golden sheen as if I was looking through that same jar of honey. Maybe at...

You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning ’til dee sun come up.

My husband and I used to visit New Orleans every couple of months. It’s hard to imagine such a unique city will never be the same again.

Momma was with the pony last night. Lily and me have him in the mornings, and we give him a wash with the shammy cloths and a soapy bucket so he’s ready for Jade to...

I didn’t dare put down the staff with Etienne popping in and out like a half-burned, bloodsucking whack-a-mole.

The two things that are absolutely necessary to ensure public health clean drinking water and proper sewage systems simply are not available in the east bank area of New Orleans at this time.

She was evil. Couldn’t he, who killed demons with his own hands, realize that? And now I had to run for Mardi Gras Queen because of him. Or her. I didn’t know whose fault it...

An iron? Was he kidding? God

There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.

I guess us folks in California are kind of straitlaced and old-fashioned.”Hahaha, I thought on the way downstairs. I never thought I’d say those words with a straight face…

Despite what some people have said, President Bush did not want black people to die in New Orleans. However, he did hope they would not relocate to any areas of Texas that he likes to...

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard...