Banner Books - Böcker

The problem of ""the color line,"" W.E.B. Du Bois's ever-present polemical theme, is at the core of this novel of sensual love, radical politics, and the quest for racial justice. Originally published by Harcourt Brace and Co. in 1928, Dark Princess was one of two novels written by Du Bois. Toward the end of his life he ranked it as his favorite of all his works.For the fantastical storyline, heavy with propagandist overtones, Du Bois depicts 1920s America as a racist nation primed for radical protest and terrorism. Matthew Townes, the protagonist, is a medical student expelled because his race bars him from the required course in obstetrics in a white hospital. Self-exiled in Berlin after his political idealism is corrupted, Townes falls in love with Princess Kautilya, daughter of a maharajah, and joins the international team she heads in which people of color unite against white imperialism. Du Bois recounts their quest for liberation in a whites-only world that overwhelms their passionate love and separates them. Du Bois concludes the novel with the birth of their son--proclaimed as the Maharajah of Bwodpur and ""Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds.""The reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune found ""amidst much pure romance and preciosity of style there are rich deposits of straight sociology [as well as] interesting and revealing reading [for] the white reader who has yet few ways of looking into the many closed chambers of Negro life or of seeing into the dilemmas of the intellectual Negro mind and heart.""

Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it has been a second home. A one-time resident who returns there, this native-born Mississippian has found Italy to be an enchanting land whose culture lends itself powerfully to her artistic vision.Some of her most acclaimed work is set there. Her American characters encounter but never quite wholly adjust to the mysteries of the Italian mores. Collected here in one volume are Spencer's six Italian tales. Their plots are so alluring and enigmatic that Boccaccio would have been charmed by their delightful ironies and their sinister contrasts of dark and light.Spencer is grounded in two bases-Italy and the American South. Her characters too, mostly Southerners, rove in search of connection and fulfillment.In The Light in the Piazza (a novella which has become both Spencer's signature piece and a Hollywood film) a stranger from North Carolina, traveling with her beautiful daughter, encounters the intoxicating beauty of sunlit Florence and discovers a deep conflict in the moral dilemma it presents. ""I think this work has great charm,"" Spencer has said, ""and it probably is the real thing, a work written under great compulsion, while I was under the spell of Italy. But it took me, all told, about a month to write.""In Knights and Dragons (another novella and a companion piece to The Light in the Piazza) an American woman in Rome and Venice struggles for release from her husband's sinister control over her. Spencer sets this tale in the cold and wintry dark and here portrays the other face of Italy. In ""The Cousins,"" ""The Pincian Gate,"" ""The White Azalea,"" and ""The Visit,"" Spencer shows the exceptional artistry that has merited acclaim for her as one of America's first-class writers of the short story.

In 1967, when this brave book was first published, Myrlie Evers said, ""Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband.""Medgar Evers died in a horrifying act of political violence. Among both blacks and whites the killing of this Mississippi civil rights leader intensified the menacing moods of unrest and discontent generated during the civil rights era. His death seemed to usher in a succession of political shootings--Evers, then John Kennedy, then Martin Luther King, Jr., then Robert Kennedy.At thirty-seven while field secretary for the NAACP, Evers was gunned down in Jackson, Mississippi, during the summer of 1963. Byron De La Beckwith, an arch segregationist charged with the crime, was released after two trials with hung juries. In 1994, after new evidence surfaced thirty years later, Beckwith was arrested and tried a third time. Medgar Evers's widow saw him convicted and jailed with a life sentence.In For Us, the Living this extraordinary woman tells a moving story of her courtship and of her marriage to this heroic man who learned to live with the probability of violent death. She describes her husband's unrelenting devotion to the quest of achieving civil rights for thousands of black Mississippians and of his ultimate sacrifice on that hot summer night.With this reprinting of her poignant yet painful memoir, a book long out of print comes back to life and underscores the sacrifice of Medgar Evers and his family.Introduced in a reflective essay written by the acclaimed Mississippi author Willie Morris, this account of Evers's professional and family life will cause readers to ponder how his tragic martyrdom quickened the pace of justice for black people while withholding justice from him for thirty years. Since the conviction of Beckwith in a dramatic and historical trial in a Mississippi court there has been renewed acclaim for Evers. One speculates that, had he lived, he might have attained even more for the equality of African Americans in national life.

Ironically, Winnifred Eaton published most of her works under a Japanese-sounding name, Onoto Watanna, but she was of Chinese ancestry. In Me: Book of Rembrance her narrator is called Nora Ascouth, but in the plot, as Nora journeys from her birthplace in Canada to the West Indies and to the United States, Eaton recounts her own early life and writing career. One of sixteen children, Nora leaves her destitute family in Quebec to earn a living. Only seventeen and with ten dollars in her pocket she sets sail for Jamaica and the chance to do newspaper work. Nora ends up in Chicago, moving from job to job, trying all along to sell stories she writes in her spare time. When she discovers that the man with whom she is in love is married, she moves to New York and gains achievement as a novelist. Against this nineteenth-century sensibility of Nora's search for success and love, Eaton conveys the powerlessness of the typical young woman of the working class. Her autobiographical plotline discloses a remarkable secret, Eaton's reticence about her own half-Chinese ancestry. Despite the silence of the text, Me: A Book of Rembrance reveals turn-of-the-century views on race, gender, and class. In Jamaica Nora describes the racial inequities and disparities. Moreover, when she says, ""I myself was dark and foreign-looking, but the blond type I adored,"" she reveals the extent of her own internalized oppression. Although the author believes her own mixed ancestry precludes prejudice on her part, the text proves otherwise. Like other ethnic immigrants, Nora is indoctrinated into America's Anglo preference.

Early on the morning of Christmas Eve, 1940, Artemus Kane leaves his sweetheart's New Orleans flat to catch the northbound Silver Star, a first-class passenger train on the Southern Railway. Artemus, a brakeman, will help bring the train to Meridian, Mississippi, a 180-mile journey along what the railroad men call ""Pelican Road."" Meanwhile, in the Meridian yard, conductor Frank Smith awakes in his caboose. A few hours later, Smith will take charge of a fast freight train southbound for the Crescent City.Smith and Kane, who served together in the Marine Corps during World War I, are old comrades. Their friendship flourishes amid the community of railroad men who work along Pelican Road - a brotherhood whose lives are spent among the lights and shadows, the danger and humor and violence, and the loneliness and camaraderie of railroad work. On this Christmas Eve, however, Smith and Kane are each bound on a journey that will alter their lives forever.Pelican Road is a novel played out against the landscape of a vanished way of life. Howard Bahr, who worked as a brakeman and yard clerk in the twilight years of old-time railroading, brings the authenticity of experience to his narrative. Pelican Road, however, seems more than a railroad adventure story. At its heart, the novel is about friendship and love, about men and women who persevere in the face of hardship and danger and who, in the end, find redemption in each other.

This dirt-under-the-fingernails portrait of a small-time farmer follows Zack Killebrew over a single year as he struggles to defend his cotton against such timeless adversaries as weeds, insects, and drought, as well as such twenty-first-century threats as globalization. Over the course of the season, Helferich describes how this singular crop has stamped American history and culture like no other. Then, as Killebrew prepares to harvest his cotton, two hurricanes named Katrina and Rita devastate the Gulf Coast and barrel inland. Killebrew’s tale is at once a glimpse into our nation’s past, a rich commentary on our present, and a plain-sighted vision of the future of farming in the Mississippi Delta.On first publication, High Cotton won the Authors Award from the Mississippi Library Association. This updated edition includes a new afterword, which resumes the story of Zack Killebrew and his family, discusses how cotton farming has continued to change, and shows how the Delta has retained its elemental character.

In Forty Acres and a Goat, Will D. Campbell picks up where the award-winning Brother to a Dragonfly leaves off, accounting his adventures during the tumultuous civil rights era. As he navigates through the explosive 1960s, including pivotal moments like the integration of Little Rock High School and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Brother Will finds his faith challenged. To further complicate matters, a series of jobs did not pan out as expected--pastorate in Louisiana, director of religious life at the University of Mississippi, and with the National Council of Churches--leaving Brother Will ""with a call but no steeple."" In an effort to find his place as a preacher, he moves his family to a farm in rural Tennessee and fashions his own unique style of ministry and a maverick relationship with God, land, and all his fellow pilgrims.

In Brother to a Dragonfly, Will D. Campbell writes about his life growing up poor in Amite County, Mississippi, during the 1930s alongside his older brother, Joe. Though they grew up in a close-knit family and cared for each other, the two went on to lead very different lives. After serving together in World War II, Will became a highly educated Baptist minister who later became a major figure in the early years of the civil rights movement, and Joe became a pharmacist who developed a substance abuse problem that ultimately took his life.Brother to a Dragonfly also serves as a historical record. Though Will's love and dedication to his brother are the primary story, interwoven throughout the narrative is the story of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement. Will is present through many of the most pivotal moments in history--he was one of four people who escorted black students integrating the Little Rock public schools; he was the only white person present at the founding of the SCLC; he helped CORE and SNCC Freedom Riders integrate interstate bus travel; he joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s campaign of boycotts, sit-ins, and marches in Birmingham; and he was at the Lorraine Motel the night Dr. King was assassinated.Will's accomplishments, however, never take the spotlight from his brother, and as his relationship with Joe evolves, so does Will's faith. Featuring a new foreword by Congressman John Lewis, this book brings back to print the combined lives of Will Campbell--Will the brother and Will the preacher.

On August 10, 1856, the Gulf of Mexico reared up and hurled itself over Last Island, near New Orleans. The storm essentially split the island in half and swept much of it away, including its inhabitants, wealthy vacationers, and its resort hotel. There were few survivors.Lafcadio Hearn used these basic historical facts to create Chita. Originally published in 1889, this novella is a minor masterpiece that is by turns mysterious, mesmerizing, and tragic. In the aftermath of the storm, a Spanish fisherman wades into the Gulf to pick through debris. Among the bodies, he finds one that is yet alive, a young Creole girl. Her parents are presumed to have died in the storm.Raised by the fisherman's family, Chita grows into a strong, independent young woman. Her story is counterpointed by that of her lost father, a doctor who thinks that his daughter is dead and, as a result, devotes himself to helping others in need. When he comes to Last Island to help stem a yellow fever epidemic, he encounters Chita. The consequences are devastating.This beautifully lush, ornately styled tale of south Louisiana in the nineteenth century is a haunting novel that is both impressionistic in its evocation of nature and realistic in its characterizations and depictions of life in this region.Jefferson Humphries's introduction puts Chita in perspective, gives an overview of critical reactions to the novel from its initial publication to the present, and provides a capsule biography of Hearn and a commentary on the stylistic influences on his work.

Parisian Pauline Guyot (1805–1886), who wrote under the nom de plume Camille Lebrun, published many novels, translations, collections of tales, and articles in French magazines of her day. Yet she has largely been forgotten by contemporary literary critics and readers. Among her works is a hitherto-untranslated 1845 French novel, Amitié et dévouement, ou Trois mois à la Louisiane, or Friendship and Devotion, or Three Months in Louisiana, a moralizing, educational travelogue meant for a young adult readership of the time. Lebrun’s novel is one of the few perspectives we have by a mid-nineteenth-century French woman writer on the matters of slavery, abolition, race relations, and white supremacy in France’s former Louisiana colony. E. Joe Johnson and Robin Anita White have recovered this work, providing a translation, an accessible introduction, extensive endnote annotations, and period illustrations. After a short preface meant to educate young readers about the geography, culture, and history of the southern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase, the novel tells the tale of two teenaged, orphaned Americans, Hortense Melvil and Valentine Arnold. The two young women, who characterize one another as "sisters," have spent the majority of their lives in a Parisian boarding school and return to Louisiana to begin their adult lives. Almost immediately upon arrival in New Orleans, their close friendship faces existential threats: grave illness in the form of yellow fever, the prospect of marriage separating the two, and powerful discrimination in the form of racial prejudice and segregation.

Parisian Pauline Guyot (1805–1886), who wrote under the nom de plume Camille Lebrun, published many novels, translations, collections of tales, and articles in French magazines of her day. Yet she has largely been forgotten by contemporary literary critics and readers. Among her works is a hitherto-untranslated 1845 French novel, Amitié et dévouement, ou Trois mois à la Louisiane, or Friendship and Devotion, or Three Months in Louisiana, a moralizing, educational travelogue meant for a young adult readership of the time. Lebrun’s novel is one of the few perspectives we have by a mid-nineteenth-century French woman writer on the matters of slavery, abolition, race relations, and white supremacy in France’s former Louisiana colony. E. Joe Johnson and Robin Anita White have recovered this work, providing a translation, an accessible introduction, extensive endnote annotations, and period illustrations. After a short preface meant to educate young readers about the geography, culture, and history of the southern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase, the novel tells the tale of two teenaged, orphaned Americans, Hortense Melvil and Valentine Arnold. The two young women, who characterize one another as "sisters," have spent the majority of their lives in a Parisian boarding school and return to Louisiana to begin their adult lives. Almost immediately upon arrival in New Orleans, their close friendship faces existential threats: grave illness in the form of yellow fever, the prospect of marriage separating the two, and powerful discrimination in the form of racial prejudice and segregation.

Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate, from a Jewish couple encountering a dealer in Nazi memorabilia to the troubled family of a Gulf Coast fisherman awaiting a hurricane. Tom Piazza’s debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in American fiction and letters. Set in Memphis, New Orleans, Florida, Texas, New York City, and elsewhere, the stories echo voices from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson in their sharp eye for detail and their emotional impact. New to this volume is an introduction written by the author. Drawing themes, forms, and stylistic approaches from blues and country music, these stories present a tough, haunting vision of a landscape where the social and spiritual ground shifts constantly underfoot.

Ashton, Mississippi, provides the deceptively sterile, conforming, and blindly respectable background in The Welcome, a novel written by Hubert Creekmore in 1948. After moving to New York following Jim’s wedding, Don returns home, routed by the Depression of the 1930s. He finds Jim stuck in an unhappy marriage, and Don's arrival intensifies Jim’s misery. As Jim sinks into alcoholism, Don connects with a new love interest, and their mutual friends persistently try to unlock the secrets between Don and Jim.Ahead of its time in the depiction of same-sex relationships, the novel caused a scandal upon release. As Phillip "Pip" Gordon says in the new introduction written for this edition, "the majority of gay fiction prior to The Welcome structured tragedy as a natural outcome for being gay. Creekmore aimed higher and sought a narrative that does not show the same-sex lovers as flawed for their desires; rather, the problem is context."Creekmore was a prolific writer, literary critic, editor, translator, photographer, and librettist, and was good friends with famed Mississippi author Eudora Welty. However, Creekmore never had the success of his peers, and his work has been neglected, most of it falling out of print. This new edition recovers a significant addition to the canon of LGBTQ southern literature and a Mississippi author for a generation of new readers and scholars.

Readers captivated by this book will be happy that Bill Ferris found Ray Lum and that he thought to turn on a tape recorder. Lum (1891-1977) was a mule skinner, a livestock trader, an auctioneer, and an American original.This delightful book, first published in 1992 as You Live and Learn. Then You Die and Forget It All, preserves Lum's colorful folk dialect and captures the essence of this one-of-a-kind figure who seems to have stepped full-blooded from the pages of Mark Twain. This riveting tale-spinner was tall, heavy-set, and full of body rhythm as he talked. In his special world, he was famous for trading, for tale-telling, and for common-sense lessons that had made him a savvy bargainer and a shrewd businessman. His home and his auction barn were in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where mules were his main interest, but in trading he fanned out over twenty states and even into Mexico. A west Texas newspaper reported his fame this way, ""He is known all over cow country for his honest, fair dealing and gentlemanly attitude. . . .A letter addressed to him anywhere in Texas probably would be delivered.""Over several years, Ferris recorded Lum's many long conversations that detail livestock auctioneering, cheery memories of rustic Deep South culture, and a philosophy of life that is grounded in good horse sense. Even among the most spellbinding talkers, Lum is a standout both for what he has to say and for the way he says it. Ferris's lucky, protracted encounters with him turn out to be the best of good fortune for everybody.

In the Civil Rights movement, 1964 was the year of Freedom Summer. On June 21, Mississippi, one of the last bastions of segregation in America and a bloody battleground in the fight for black equality, reached a low point in its history. On that steamy night, three young activists were abducted and murdered in Neshoba County near the small town of Philadelphia. William Bradford Huie was sent to this seething community to cover the breaking story. This book is his documentary account written in the heat of the dangerous and dramatic moment. Huie reveals not only the harrowing events in this heinous case but also the reaction of ordinary citizens who allowed murder to serve as their defense of prejudice. This Banner Books edition includes Huie's report on the trial three years later. Nineteen local men were charged. Seven were found guilty-of conspiracy, not murder.

Liberty, one of the most consequential words in our language, is one of the most treasured concepts in American thought--and one of the most intensely debated. Its meaning is constantly shifting, changing not only from one culture to another but also, over time, within the same culture. No two definitions of liberty seem alike.In this subtle and illuminating work Michael Kammen traces the evolving concept of liberty throughout American history and provides a solid framework for understanding the meaning of the term today. He shows that by the early seventeenth century a tension between liberty and authority was well recognized. Throughout the eighteenth century and especially during the American Revolution a bond between liberty and property was asserted. By the end of the eighteenth century this concept of liberty was so well established that it remained dominant throughout the nineteenth. By the early twentieth century, as the notion of social justice gained prominence, liberty and justice were paired frequently, and by midcentury the two had become allied to general American values. Since the 1960s the union of liberty and equality has been the prevailing notion, and achieving them has proved a major objective.In a lively and learned manner Kammen also shows that Americans have subscribed to different definitions of liberty concurrently. Above all, there has been a steady expansion of what is embraced by the concept of liberty. This expansion has created difficulties in public discourse, causing groups to misunderstand one another. On the other hand, interpretations of liberty have broadened to include such concepts as constraints on authority, a right to privacy, and the protection of personal freedoms.In a new preface for this Banner Books edition Kammen responds to evaluations of earlier editions and places his views within the context of more recent studies.

Elizabeth Spencer presents a vital, moving story set in the deep South--the Delta and Mississippi hill country. Amos Dudley was a farm boy in the Delta country at the turn of the century until he started working for his brother Ephraim in the store by the railroad. It was an ordinary enough environment in which to begin to feel the strange forces that move a man to set his course in the world.But the forces working within Amos were by no means ordinary. Sometimes cruel, sometimes suddenly tender, they were strong and willful, so that Amos became a man to reckon with--to Ary, his beautiful, plantation-born wife, to the woman in the bayou, to the shiftless philosopher, Arney. Even the rich black swamp soil which he wrested from the forest and gave to his cotton seemed to respond with awe and eagerness to Amos's will. His sensuous, wayward daughter and the man she loved especially felt the full shattering drama of the violence which had evidently been building--building in the fate of a man who, regardless, takes his own crooked way.

Elizabeth Spencer is ""a master storyteller"" (San Francisco Chronicle), her work called ""dazzling"" by Walker Percy. Whether she's writing short stories or novels, Spencer is acclaimed for holding her worlds up to light and turning them to see what they reflect. The Night Travellers, set in North Carolina and Montreal during the Vietnam War years, is her most revealing work yet.Mary Kerr Harbison is a promising teenaged dancer when she meets Jefferson Blaise, an intellectual radical-in-the-making. He becomes a part of her life and over the objections of Mary's wealthy, abusive mother, her husband. But although Jeff's heart is devoted to Mary, his life is devoted to protesting the Vietnam War--at first through the public rallies, later through guerilla tactics. As Jeff is drawn deeper and deeper into the movement, he and Mary are forced to go underground and eventually move to Canada. Jeff's activities keep him on the move, and Mary, living in Montreal, struggles to raise her daughter and make a life for herself.An exploration of a dramatic period in our history, The Night Travellers is a powerful depiction of lives forever changed by political beliefs and fervidly held convictions.

Nat Stonebridge is a thirtyish divorcee who, because of her sexy good looks and incorruptible disregard for convention, has stayed in trouble most of her life. Stranded at home in Philippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, after a divorce from her well-to-do husband, she is broke, bored, and unconcerned for anyone except herself. Looking for excitement, she becomes involved with Floyd Shotwell, the strange, solitary son of a rich and ruthless businessman.By turns ironic and funny and threatening as the raw land in which it takes place, the couple's story moves toward a violent climax in which not only Nat's physical safety, but the financial security of her family, are at stake. Douglas explores the theme of moral commitment as Nat is confronted with a decision, a sacrifice, which she knows will earn her only contempt. In turn, her friend, the gentle and reflective Wilburn Griffith, is forced to face the obsessive Shotwell with a weapon he abhors.

So spontaneous is the writing in A Lifetime Burning, one might believe these are indeed words of a woman desperately trying to understand what has happened to her life, beginning with the fact that her husband has stopped sleeping with her.Why? Is there a rival--perhaps ""The Toad,"" the unattractive housewife next door--or someone else, who will completely surprise the reader, as do many of the events of the protagonist's story? At age sixty-two, Corinne must grapple with the most painful truth that her lifelong passion--which is anyone's passion, to love and be loved, body and soul--could burn unquenched forever. Her imaginative narrative even when she is lying is as revealing as bedrock truth. A Lifetime Burning is as real as life itself--a novel shimmering and vital and recognizably true. Gripping, smart, suspenseful, and at times, wonderfully witty, Douglas's widely acclaimed book forms a searching and searing record of love, anger, confession, and discovery.

This story of the modern South, of love denied and love fulfilled, is a powerful account of the potential for violence that underlies this country's passionate history. Ellen Douglas, a native of Mississippi and a prize-winning novelist of rare distinction, reveals the turbulent changes that rocked the South in the sixties and continue to this day.No event is predictable in this powerful novel. A young man who has spent several years in the North returns to his native Mississippi seeking rural peace. But solitude is not to be his, for soon he is caught up again in a traumatic event that happened seven years before in 1964--the death in an auto accident of the beautiful young cousin whom he loved.As the story unfolds, the people who were involved in that senseless tragedy reveal their part in it, and as they do, the reader becomes intensely involved not only in their lives but in what it means to be black or white in the modern South.

Admirers of Elizabeth Spencer's writing will welcome back into print her first novel, and her new readers will discover the sources of her notable talent in this book. Published in 1948 to extraordinary attention from such eminent writers as Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter, this father-and-son story revolves around an old southern theme of family grievances and vendettas.Fire in the Morning recounts the conflict between two families extending over two generations up to the 1930s.The arrival of an innocent stranger flares old arguments and ignites new passions. In Spencer's compelling tale of the half-forgotten violence, the well-deep understanding of father and son, Kinloch Armstrong, the young hero, confronts mysteries of the past. His wife, a newcomer to the area and its legacies, makes friends with a family of traditional rivals. After she is involved in a nighttime wreck and the death of a local man, the past gradually comes to light, and the two families once again become caught up in revelations, hatreds, and conflicts. Spencer faithfully renders the setting--a small, dusty Mississippi town--and the surrounding countryside as it was in the early twentieth century.

The magnetic appeal of land, sea, and sky along the southern coast has drawn Elizabeth Spencer many times to this lush and semitropical setting. This collection brings together six of her stories set amid terrain lapped by the warm coastal currents. These stories all happen on the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico, from New Orleans to Florida. In each a girl or young woman gives voice to the narrative, probing and groping for a secure place and identity.The six stories included here are ""On the Gulf,"" ""The Legacy,"" ""A Fugitive's Wife,"" ""Mr. McMillan,"" ""Go South in the Winter,"" and ""Ship Island."" Each reveals the special allure of the Gulf Coast region through the author's depiction of character and engagement with the complexities of plot. In these stories that illuminate the lives of sundry females--from insecure waifs to novice seductresses--Spencer investigates female psyche, a topic which lies at the core of much of her fiction.

It is well known that New Orleans has its dark underside as well as its glowing visible delights. The journey that Julia Garrett, an intelligent, attractive, but psychically driven girl, makes through the city's hidden labyrinth shapes the movement of this riveting novel. In crisscrossing the city from the secure world of home in the Garden District to the titillating world of the Vieux Carré, Julia risks physical and psychological peril. As she explores life on the other side, she becomes engulfed in the vortex of evil.In The Snare, one of America's most highly acclaimed fiction writers explores the mystery of place and the mystifying duality of the human wish, with its desire for both dark and light. The book masterfully evokes the ineffable sense of excitement aroused by the sinister, exotic beauty of New Orleans and the men and women who inhabit its fecund streets.