1,001 Novels A Library of America
Collected: Louisiana
Louisiana is a formidable literary topic, mostly but not entirely because of New Orleans, an inquisitive reader also has to take into account the Delta- both cotton and sugar plantations, as well as the Bayou and the Cajuns. Within New Orleans you've got historical fiction- the only place in this entire chapter (Apologies to Gone With the Wind in Georgia) where historical fiction makes sense. Then you've got a body of post-Katrina lit and everything that came before it in that department and an element of noir/police fiction as well. It's a satisfying mix, such that editor Susan Straight wasn't able to include a YA title in Louisiana's 30 titles. It's funny when a specific state has ONE writer that represents them on the national literary map. Starting with Stephen King in Maine, then you come all the way down here and get John Grisham in Mississippi followed by Anne Rice (and her son, even) in Louisiana.
Published 2/16/24
The Moviegoer (1961)
by Walker Percy
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 1/30
I'm not sure where I read about The Moviegoer, Walker Percy's 1962 National Book Award Winner, but I found an Audiobook copy in the Libby Library act and I couldn't resist: A National Book Award Winning author I've never heard of is irresistible. I've noticed that Major Literary Prizes don't do a great job of picking titles that endure- most (all?) major literary prizes are decided by a committee so you are talking about horse-trading and compromise in the quest to pick a winner for any particular year. Back in 1962, the National Book Award named nine finalists and one winner. The Moviegoer beat Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was eligible to be nominated but did not make the list of finalists. We Have Always Lived in the Castle was published in the eligibility period but didn't make the list of finalists.
Is The Moviegoer better than any of those other books? No. But here you have it, the 1962 National Book Award. An additional grounds to doubt the worthiness of this book as a prize winner is the fact that Percy never got close again, even though he continued to publish. There is nothing wrong with winning a major literary prize with your first novel, but if you don't come close to doing it again it calls into question your literary legacy. This leaves a contemporary reader asking the question, "Why?"
I think, in this case, the answer is that was doing a regional variation on a theme that was still in vogue in 1961-62: The existentialist anti-hero. Percy's Moviegoer is a classic existentialist hero, like someone you might find in an early Jean Luc Godard film. He is a college graduate, a returned Vietnam Vet and a stock broker in New Orleans. It's worth observing that while Percy didn't make the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die List, this book is on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, representing New Orleans.
New Orleans is in Chapter 5: Blues & Bayous, Deltas & Coasts, which includes all the states from Florida to Louisiana. Louisiana has 30 titles on the list, 13 of those are from the city of New Orleans.
My sense is that while the existential hero AND southern literature were in style when he won, both trends have dropped in prominence over the past half century. Percy also wrote The Moviegoer right before the 1960's revolution in culture, which means that it is going to get crowded out by books written after and books written before it was published.
Is there any question that of the books mentioned in this post, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the most canonical title and that Catch-22, Revolutionary Road and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are better picks than this one.
Published: 5/16/25
The Long-Legged Fly (1992)
by James Sallis
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana 2/30
I have adjusted my approach to completing the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to reflect the fact that I am now driving less than I have been over the past decade. I have less time to listen to Audiobooks in the car, and that makes me more selective about the titles I choose. No more YA fiction or struggle narratives in Audiobook format, it's quicker and easier to just glide through the print copy since that category of book rarely takes more than an hour to read, but multiple hours to listen. SO, while I read at one end of this chapter, Georgia, I'm listening at the other end: Louisiana. And by Louisiana I'm mostly talking about New Orleans, which boasts 13 of the 28 titles in this subchapter. Also I'd be willing to wager that many of the other Louisiana books set somewhere else on the map have significant action inside New Orleans.
New Orleans is not a first-tier American literary city but it is certainly in the group after the first tier- I'd put in the same group as Boston, San Francisco and Seattle. It's an interesting place, and it has historically drawn writing talent attracted to the anarchy of New Orleans. The Long-Legged Fly, by underrated author James Sallis, is a great way to kick off the festivities. Sallis is best known today as the author of Drive-which was made into the Ryan Gosling movie. The Long-Legged Fly was his first novel, about African-American detective Lew Griffin. Fly is anything but a conventional detective novel, taking place across the decades to give a fuller portrait of the detective. This is a great example of how good the 1,001 Novels project can get- because I'd never heard of Sallis before reading this book, and now I think I'll go on and check out his other books.
Published: 5/21/25
Orleans (2013)
by Sherri L. Smith
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 3/30
This is a YA post-apocalyptic title, set in a New Orleans which has been disenfranchised from the rest of the country after a series of horrific hurricanes and the consequent emergence of a fever which infected all the remaining residents. I could not believe that this book- which is almost entirely about tribes divided by blood types and the raids that go back and forth as people try to steal blood from one another. The narration is split between a local teen and an outsider, Daniel a scientist with the military who is researching a cure for the fever.
Again, I was startled that a book marketed to teens would contain so many scenes of cringe-inducing blood theft and minors being raped as a matter of course, but what do I know.
Published: 5/23/25
Purple Cane Road (2000)
by James Lee Burke
New Iberia Parish, Louisiana
Louisiana: 4/30
Purple Cane Road is one of 24 volumes in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series- about a Louisiana sheriff's deputy who isn't afraid to use investigatory techniques that should probably get him fired. This being Louisiana, he does, not, apparently get fired in this or any other book. He is also obsessed with the solving the mystery of who murdered his Mom (aren't we all?) This book weaves what can only be described as a familiar mix of police procedural and criminal deviousness, with a well-mannered hit man and a loose-cannon sidekick filling in the cast. I listened to the Audiobook- which- like some other parts of the country, I like because the narrators do accents that I could not do in my head.
Published: 7/28/25
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)
by Ernest J. Gaines
Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana
Louisiana: 5/30
It's true my progress on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has stalled out on two fronts- Pennsylvania, where Philly and the suburbs broke my heart with banality, and the deep south, where a lack of Audiobook options has sent me clambering back and forth between Georgia and Louisiana. Compounding the situation is a general lack of interest in some of editor Susan Straight's favorite genres: sad coming-of-age stories and domestic fiction, generally. Both genre's make a good fit for the criteria of the project, which seemingly dictates that a specific work be tied to a specific place- neither neglected/abused children in poverty nor housewives facing the same challenges go many places. By the standards of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, Miss Jane Pittman, the subject and narrator of her Autobiography, is well travelled. Originally published in 1971, the Audiobook wasn't created for 25 years. It was also hard not to think about the success of The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All, which was published in 1989. Surely Allan Gurganus, the author of The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All was aware of this book when he wrote his book.
The idea here is that Miss Jane Pittman lives a life that spans slavery to Civil War, born a slave, ending by marching for her rights in rural Louisiana. In between, she lives a relatively privileged life, emerging out of the chaos of the Civil War to marry, survive her husband and settle down as a domestic servant who lives in the big house. Along the way she sees plenty- mostly cruelty with some kindness sprinkled in. Autobiography takes a hard right turn in the last third of the book to detail a doomed relationship between the white scion of the plantation and an "octoroon" schoolteacher from New Orleans before concluding during the Civil Rights era.
It makes for a great Audiobook because of the oral history format- Pittman recounting to an unseen scribe.
Published 11/21/25
Louisiana Lucky (2020)
by Julie Pennell
445 East Main Street, New Iberia, Louisiana
Louisiana: 6/30
A definite low point in my recent 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, I checked out the E-book from the library on vacation because it seemed like an easy job and indeed, I finished Louisiana Lucky in about an hour, mostly because I didn't read it very closely. I try not to be a snob about my reading habits- this entire project is testament to my good intentions, but there is no denying that the three lottery winning sisters from this novel are some of the least interesting American's I've come across, and Julie Pennell is writing for an audience of suburban housewives- and not the interesting kind.
The three sisters win a substantial lottery jackpot, rescuing them from lives among the lower bourgeois of this part of the world. One sister spends the entire book upgrading her wedding from a ramshackle DIY affair to something worthy of a bridezilla episode. Another sends her two kids to a snooty private school and suffers from a cold welcome. The third- a respected local print (lol) journalist, takes advantage of her found fame to move to television journalism, which is a hard transition. Louisiana Lucky is certain to be a bottom three title in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.
Published: 12/30/25
Cane River (2001)
by Lalita Tademy
Cane River, Louisiana
Louisiana: 7/30
Cane River is, geographically speaking, the westernmost title in this entire Chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. Louisiana is culturally distinct from Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi because of greater diversity among the population, notably an enfranchised, property owning and even slave holding elite that co-existed with whites throughout the 18th and 19th century. "Elite" of course, is a relative term. At one end of the spectrum there were the cosmopolitans of New Orleans. At the other end there are the families of Cane River, mixed race families with some limited advantages over the local white settlers, but without the protections of big city life. Tademy lovingly depicts this precarious existence over several generations.
I checked out this Audiobook because this book actually sounded interesting and it was, but it was still hard to take at times because of the wanton sexual violence that every African American seemingly experience in antebellum America and finds its way into any serious literary account of the time and place.
Published 1/15/26
The Next Step in the Dance (1998)
by Tim Gautreaux
Morgan City, Louisiana
Louisiana: 8/30
It is rare that I actually really enjoy reading a book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. Part of that derives from the fact that I've read, essentially, all of the "classics" that Susan Straight has included in the project- we are talking about canon level titles from 19th, 20th and 21st century American literature here, and let's face it, the list isn't that long. Part of it comes from the fact that Straight needs to rely heavily on chick-lit and genre fiction to actually populate large swathes of the American literary map. And I guess the last part of it is the lack of thematic variety within each particular state- I really should be going through and doing one book at a time from each state instead of staying within a single region/chapter of the project to avoid that particular phenomenon.
Which is all a preamble for saying that I actually enjoyed reading The Next Step in the Dance on its own merit, and Tim Gautreaux is an author who I would be interested in reading outside of a project-based title. I know for sure the reason I liked this book is that the main character was blue collar (a Cajun machinist) and part of the book actually deals with his work life and the things he has to do as part of that life. It's an issue that extends well beyond the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to all precincts of American literature and most of American fiction- which is that books are written by authors, and most authors- particularly writers of literary fiction- haven't done shit in their lives except write fiction. This means they can't believably write about work, let alone make a whole novel about it, which means that all fiction is inevitably domestic fiction, family fiction, and that world gets boring as hell year after year.
I would love to read a work of fiction about a farmer where the author actually knew something about the business and practice of farming, and writes about that, instead of one of fifty novels in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America where the events take PLACE on a farm but are ABOUT the abuse a young girl suffers at the hands of her father or family trauma generally.
Published 2/10/26
A Hall of Mirrors (1967)
by Robert Stone
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 9/30
I decided I can't handle Mississippi straight up so I'm going to alternate with Louisiana and Florida. I'm also done with all the Mississippi/Louisiana Audiobooks I can handle, so it's hard copy library books from here on out. A Hall of Mirrors was Stone's first novel- he won the National Book Award for Dog Soldiers in 1974. Stone was a finalist for the National Book Award three more times, but I would put him the "mostly forgotten" category- writers like Pynchon and Delillo took similar themes of paranoia and corruption at the heart of the American Dream and came up with something that appealed to critics and professors, Stone reads more like a linear descendant of Hemingway. I did enjoy A Hall of Mirrors, about an alcoholic radioman who stumbles into a nefarious ultra-right-wing conspiracy to... do what I don't know exactly. Some kind of a Civil War 2 plot I suppose, though the scheme remains hazy.
No question that A Hall of Mirrors stands out against the field of YA lit, chick lit and trauma-porn favored by editor Susan Straight. I enjoyed the depiction of down-n-out New Orleans circa the 1960s. Cool.
Published: 2/25/26
Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (2020)
by Stephanie Soileau
Bayou d’Inde Drive, Sulphur, LouisianaLouisiana: 10/30
The Gulf coastline between New Orleans and Houston is a bit of a petro-chemical nightmare, filled with petroleum processing plants and related businesses and supervised by state governments that are hostile to business regulations. It's also a region that is very exposed to the consequences of climate change, particularly the increased number and intensity of hurricane's making landfall from the Gulf. This double whammy of environmental degradation makes it entirely possible that whole communities will simply cease to exist, and soon.
This, I presume is what the title of this book references. Another layer is the weakening of the traditional Cajun community- French speaking Acadians who came down from Newfoundland after the French lost control and the English took over. From the perspective of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, Soileau rates as a minor find. Certainly, a book of interconnected short-stories about folks on the margins of life in such an interesting area rate higher than YA titles and chick-lit. Beyond that, however, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights, continues to explore the lives of the losers in American society, by far the most frequent subject of titles that aren't YA or chick-lit. Where are the folks in this book going? Nowhere. What are they doing? Nothing.
The first story, about a teen mom who is bummed about the consequences of her actions and not that into being a Mom, really sets the tone.
Published 2/27/26
Band of Angels (1955)
by Robert Penn Warren
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 11/30
Robert Penn Warren is an American author who is perpetually present on my "soft" list- like, I definitely know who he is and would say I "want to" read All the Kings Men, his big hit, but I haven't actually read it, or anything else by him. I think Warren and other prize-winning authors from the 1950's and 60's in the South have suffered because the wave of African American authors, especially women authors, that emerged in the 1970's and 80's, culminating with Toni Morrison getting the Nobel Prize in 1993. I'd wager that every time Morrison got added to a 20th century literature syllabus Warren or his ilk got dropped.
Reading Band of Angeles- about an Oberlin educated woman who is surprised when her father dies, and she is sold into slavery to settle his debts- I was struck by the stylistic similarities between Warren and Cormac McCarthy- and learned they shared a publisher!
In many ways Band of Angeles is as daring as anything written about this subject from this time period- in that he deals frankly with the sexual aspects of slavery in a way that authors shied from prior to the aforementioned African American authorial revolution in the 1970's. But it also pulls its literary punch by having the protagonist's purchaser be a total gentleman... at least to her.
Band of Angels also goes on for far too long- carrying the protagonist into reconstruction and emancipation and pairing her off with a well-meaning white husband who turns out to be a total dud. After the fall of the Confederacy, my interest level took a precipitous dip, but this is still a top five title from Louisiana.
Published 3/2/26
Louisiana Power & Light (1994)
by John Dufresne
Monroe, Louisiana
Louisiana: 12/30
One fact I've learned about the geography of the South from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. The top of Louisiana is not in line with the northern borders of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. That particular line runs through the middle of Arkansas and Louisiana doesn't start until about the middle of Georgia/Alabama/Mississippi. Likewise, the vast major of the population of Louisiana lives south of the southern borders of those states- some of it lines up with the Florida panhandle, but most of the important part of Louisiana (New Orleans and environs) lines up with north-central Florida.
I mention this because the northern half of Louisiana only has three titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project and Louisiana Power & Light are one of those books. That makes Northern Louisiana one of the great underrepresented regions of America in this project, alongside Northern Alabama and Northern New York/Vermont/New Hampshire. This novel is about the last of a line of inbred swamp dwellers who is orphaned by his criminally insane father and half-wit thirteen-year-old mother and raised to become a priest, only to abandon that goal when he meets the first in a series of women.
I had low expectations for Louisiana Power & Light, but I was pleasantly surprised by the story.
Published 3/5/26
The Hard Blue Sky (1958)
by Shirley Grau
Isle Aux Chiens, Louisiana
Louisiana: 13/30
I think the highest compliment I can pay a book on this particular list is when I look up the location on the map of the project and then open the corresponding Google Maps location- that shows that I am interested. That's what I did while reading The Hard Blue Sky, an early novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Grau. I think looking at an Ngram for William Faulkner is a good proxy for interest in southern literature- Faulkner himself was the subject of a revival that saw him peak in interest in 1960 and plummet after 1990. Grau- a New Yorker short story writer who won the Pulitzer in 1965- seems like a beneficiary of that interest. I surmise that the drop off in William Faulkner interest in the 90's relates to what I imagine to be a wholesale replacement of Faulkner in American Literature survey courses with writer like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. If you draw another Ngram with Faulkner and Toni Morrison you see the lines cross in 1994, the year after Morrison won the Nobel. Faulkner, who won the Nobel in 1949, required further help from American critics specifically Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry, who is frequently credited with helping Faulkner get the Nobel in '49, and made further efforts to ensure his books didn't fall out of print before that.
I mention that because I would say Grau is largely forgotten- her Pulitzer winner has over 6000 reviews on Amazon, which indicates some continuing interest, but her other books top out at 100 reviews, with some in double digits. She got a New York Times feature obituary when she died in 2020 but he last NYT mention was in 2003. The Hard Blue Sky is a good example of the promise of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project: Rediscovering a once prominent author who I would otherwise never encounter.
It's also hard not to wonder if this physical landscape might itself be on the way out as a result of climate change and rising sea levels- this is a place where houses have been built on stilts for decades and maybe for centuries. Besides the locale, the book itself, centered on the life of a young woman coming-of-age after the untimely death of her mother, rarely rises beyond the tropes of the coming of age novel circa the late 1950's. The lessons learned by Grau's protagonist are far more genteel than the lessons learned by her African American counterparts in this part of the country: No one gets rapes. No one is murdered by law enforcement for no reason. No one has their house burned to the ground by marauding members of the Klu Klux Klan.
Published 3/9/26
Yellow Jack (1999)
by Josh Russell
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 14/30
Josh Russell is the first 1,001 Novels: A Library of American writer I can remember who does not have a Wikipedia page. He is gainfully employed, as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Georgia State University. I did take a creative writing class in college- it struck me as a borderline insane way to spend one's time and energy. I don't have a ton of respect for the teachers or students of creative writing, beyond recognizing that teaching creative writing is by the far the best way for authors of literary fiction to support themselves and their families- you gotta do what you gotta do.
Yellow Jack is set in dirty old New Orleans, about a protagonist who learns the tricks and methods of the earliest kind of photography in the studio of originator Louis Daugerre, and then flees to New Orleans, where he sets up the very first photography studio. Russell does an excellent job of conjuring early to middle 19th century New Orleans- a place where summer inevitably bought death in the form of Yellow Fever. Claude Marchand lives a life of passion and intrigue, juggling a mixed-race girlfriend and the sexually precocious (and way underage) daughter of a local bigwig. Meanwhile, the mercury that was key to developing early photographs is causing his teeth to fall out and driving him not-so-slowly insane. I wouldn't say Yellow Jack was a fun read, but it was interesting.
Published 3/11/26
Set in Motion (1978)
by Valerie Martin
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 15/30
Set in Motion is a debut novel by Valerie Martin, an author who has published steadily if intermittently over the decades (two novels in the 70s, one in the 80s, three in the 90s, three in the oughts, one in the '10s and two this decade. Her career highlights in terms of sales are Mary Reilly, her rework of Frankenstein, which landed a movie version and Property- which won the Orange Prize (Women's Prize for Fiction) in 2004. I think I actually saw the Mary Reilly movie when it was released.
Set in Motion felt like a predecessor of sad girl lit, or rather an originator of the genre. Sad Girl lit (of which I am a fan) features protagonists who are young-ish, though always grappling with issues surrounding mortality, they are not married, they do not have children, they may or may not have a job, they are prone to fits of emotion triggered by unusual and/or disturbing events. The protagonist of Set in Motion fits all these descriptors. She works for the County Welfare office vetting applicants for food-stampes. She has a bartender boyfriend who casually shoots drugs into his veins (Pre Aids!!!!). She has sex with the fiancé of her friend in a manner that borders on a contemporary description of sexual assault.
What is not to love? I also enjoyed the descriptions of New Orleans in the mid 1970's, which were a nadir for urban areas all over the United States. The sense of urban despair was palpable in this era. Love it.
Published 3/13/26
Glass House (1994)
by Christine Wiltz
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 16/30
HALF WAY THROUGH LOUISIANA. Chug-chug that train be moving. I am deep into New Orleans. New Orleans and environs makes up more than half of the Louisiana chapter, which sounds right to me. Interesting literary subjects of Louisiana being 1) New Orleans: It's places and peoples and 2) Cajun/Bayou country. The rest is just plantation country with more mixed-race people in positions of power. Wiltz is another one of these roughly contemporary women writers that editor Susan Straight favors in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. Wiltz has one best-seller, about the "last madam" of New Orleans. She's also got a handful of genre titles (The Neal Rafferty New Orleans Mystery Series, 1-III). Finally, there is Glass House, a conventional 1990's era "city novel" centered around the experience of urban living during the fraught decades between the 1970's and 2000's. Inevitably, these books are written from a white perspective, with African American's showing up in sympathetic supporting roles that are often fraught with ambiguity.
Here, the protagonist is a newly single woman moving back to New Orleans to inherit her spinster Aunt's rickety old mansion. She is still coping with the experience of having her parents murdered by an African American teen inside their Mom n Pop grocery store- classic 80's/90's issue book murder right there. She reconnects with an old flame struggling with his own set of issues, and the darkly charismatic contractor/local drug kingpin who is also the son of her deceased Aunt's housekeeper-for-life. Wiltz casts a sympathetic eye on her literary version of an inner-city drug kingpin, mostly we hear about his attempts to clean up the projects he calls home and he and his henchman do not engage in any criminal activity in the pages of this book.
Published 3/18/26
Things We Lost to the Water (2021)
by Eric Nguyen
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 17/30
This is the first Vietnamese American author to make it into 1,001 Novels: A Library of American since Ocean Vuong represented Hartford, Connecticut in the New England chapter. It's hard for me to read ANY book written by a Vietnamese American author without thinking about the work- fictional and non-fictional by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen. Ocean Vuong though, is the more obvious comparison- so obvious that I wonder if comparing the two writers constitutes a microaggression. As writers they have very different styles- Vuong being a poet-at-heart who deigns to write fiction and Nguyen being a more conventional type of author.
Things We Lost to the Water is a very conventional coming-of-age story, sub-category immigrant experience, sub-category New Orleans, sub-category LGBT. In that sense, I enjoyed the author-protagonist stand-in since he was a rare character from this part of the country that actually cares about books, literature, the life of the mind- something sorely, sorely lacking in the literature of the deep south thus far. Unlike Nguyen, who has concentrated his gaze at the heart of the South Vietnamese government and military milleu of Southern California, both Nguyen and Vuong write from the edges- Vuong in New England and now Nguyen in the South. Unlike Vuong, who has a rock-solid working-class/underclass background, Nguyen's fictional situation is more complicated- his Dad, who stays in Vietnam is a college professor who falls afoul of the new regime and his Mom is a teacher. In America, Mom becomes a nail tech, and her children struggle with fitting in.
Like other Vietnamese American authors, Nguyen captures the feelings of loss, abandonment and anger that track American feelings about the Vietnamese war itself- it is an ambiguous situation, to say the least.
Published 4/1/26
Ten Seconds (1991)
by Louis Edwards
Lake Charles, Louisiana
Louisiana: 18/30
Ten Seconds is another familiar tale from the American South, albeit told with some literary ambition. Louis Edwards frames the flashback intensive format through the ten seconds it takes to run a forty-yard sprint, with the narrator reflecting on the poor choices he has made regarding his family, particularly in regard to his wife and young children. It is well trodden territory for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. I did enjoy the depiction of the narrator's commute the petro-chemical plant where he works- here in Southern California "the commute" is a huge part of everyday life, but I can't think of a single book so far- at least since the chapter on New Jersey, where commuting is even something a character does.
Published 4/2/26
The Awakening (1899)
by Kate Chopin
Grand Isle, Louisiana
Louisiana: 19/30
No re-reads! Man, that is a sassy-ass write up below- written during my year of divorce, clearly. I stand by the analysis, though.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin (10/17/13)
1,001 Books to Read Before You Die
The Awakening (1899)
by Kate Chopin
The Awakening by Kate Chopin is often called the American Madame Bovary. That makes her the fourth and last of the national Bovaries. Let's see- you've got the original by Flaubert, the Russian Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and the German Effi Briest. Although The Awakening is the only book of the four to be written by an actual woman there is nothing about it that marks off the presence of a female authorial voice. The Madame Bovary of the awakening is Edna Pontellier, a bored New Orleans house wife of a wealthy Creole stock market guy. Edna is unhappy, but she doesn't know why, oh, it must be her husband whom she decides that she no longer loves.
It is impossible to read any of the quartet of national Bovary novels without reflecting on my own experience. I have heard the words of Bovary/Karenina/Briest/Pontellier from the mouth of my own wife, and I've been through the marriage therapy sessions that these women lacked, so I am intimately familiar with the thought process that leads a woman from a "happy" marriage to an "unhappy" marriage without any assistance from a disrespectful or malevolent husband. That is something that all of these protagonist's share in common: A husband who doesn't "do" anything to merit abandonment.
After reading all four novels I am left with the abiding conviction that all four husbands make the same mistake of treating their wives with respect. It seems like if all four of these characters had been treated with a bit less respect, they might have stayed married. Perhaps they would have been unhappy, but they all seem to be pretty unhappy post separation as well, so it hardly seems like an unfair swap.
Published 4/6/26
The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880)
by George Washington Cable
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 20/30
I thought there would be more 19th century American literature in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America but thus far it hasn't been the case. The Grandissimes is the only 19th century title in this entire Chapter and I'm pretty sure there wasn't a single 19th century book in the prior chapter. The preface to this edition calls The Grandissimes "the first modern southern novel," thought they can only mean that it is the first modern by novel BY rather than ABOUT the south, since Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852 and is certainly "about" the south. The Grandissimes, set in the beginning of the 19th century (before New Orleans was an American city) is named after a local family with a white part and a "F.M.O.C" or "free man of color" part. Cable uses the conventions of 18th century gothic fiction- masked balls, confusing correspondence to heighten the drama of conflict between the white Grandissime and the colored one through the deployment of various proxies- a newly arrived white pharmacist, a creole voodoo priestess. It is, to be honest, confusing and reminded me again about how fiction influenced by 18th century fiction and early 19th century fiction can feel "post-modern" when it is actually "pre-modern."
This is the first 19th century American novel I've read in some time, and I suppose the knock on second-tier semi-classics like this one is that they are too derivative of their inspirations. Here, it's hard to find anything that doesn't seem directly lifted from Sir Walter Scott.
Published: 4/9/26
The Feast of All Saints (1979)
by Anne Rice
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana:21/30
Like Stephen King, Anne Rice hit career gold with her first published novel, Interview with the Vampire (1976) but there was an eight year gap between it and The Vampire Lestat, the first of 12(!) sequels that I didn't realize were published as late as 2018. I imagine in the period between 1976 and 1985 Rice was trying to not be pigeonholed as a one trick pony, failed, and then spent the rest of her light pooping out crap to pay for her San Francisco mansion. The Feast of All Saints reads like Interview but with the free people of color at the center instead of Vampires. Like the Grandissimes, Rice is writing this book from the perspective of someone who is not herself related to any free people of color. Her plot is confusing and hard to follow, with at least a half dozen major characters and dozens of minor characters spread out over several interrelated clans.
Marcel, the child of a French trader and rescued Haitian woman, yearns to leave New Orleans for the fairer environs of Paris, which lacks the entrenched racism of the nascent American order. He falls under the spell of Christophe, a writer who has returned to New Orleans after finding literary success abroad. Each male protagonist is surrounded by a suite of females: mothers and sisters, while a ring of predatory white men rings each female character. African American men appear only as slaves. Like all of the novels set in early 19th century New Orleans, it is impossible to ignore how deadly a place it was before medicine got a grip on yellow fever and malaria. People died every year in the hundreds. It was brutal.
Published 4/15/26
Little Altars Everywhere (1992)
by Rebecca Wells
Thornton, Louisiana
Louisiana: 22/30
Wells is best known for her viral phenomenon, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which is the publishing industry equivalent of the late-blooming chart success of Appetite for Destruction by Guns n' Roses. Both rose to number one on their respective industry charts over a year after publication. This success drew the attention of Malcolm Gladwell in HIS best-seller, Tipping Point, where he explored the word of mouth that made Ya Ya such a hit. The website for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America mistakenly lists the publication date as 2009, no idea where they got 2009 from, and not the first or second time they've listed the wrong publishing year for a mapped title.
I'm not sure it was because of my utter disinterest in the book or actual issues with the writing, but Little Altars Everywhere felt more like a knitted together cluster of short stories. It's a fine, well-travelled literary tradition though I don't think Wells was getting stuff published in the New Yorker before Little Altars Everywhere was released. I would place Wells' bibliography squarely within the "chick-lit" genre- 1992 was the year the phrase was coined, in reference to Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale. Altars fits into that broad category although it's also obvious to an almost painful degree the literary debt Altars owes to its southern literary forebears. Maybe it's just the early Eudora Welty stories I started reading after this book that put me in mind of this, but it always seems like there is pressure on writers from the deep south to add some element of freakishness, either race based or otherwise, that sets the action apart from what you commonly see in other parts of the country.
Here, there is a plot line- in a light comic novel mind you- about mother son incest that would be eyebrow raising even a much more seriously regarded work of fiction.
Published 4/22/26
A Density of Souls (2000)
by Christopher Rice
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 23/30
This is an utterly ridiculous novel by the son of author Anne Rice. Three boys and one girl are friends as children. Upon entering high school, two of the boys become "jocks," the girl becomes the girlfriend of one of the jocks and the fourth, who is clearly the main protagonist, is gay. The other three all turn on the gay friend for reasons that are entirely unexplained. Although there are no year specific tells, it seems clear that A Density of Souls, is set in the 90's, in a period where anti-gay bullying was still OK, but the bullied had an idea that their situation was temporary and would improve outside of high school. The story just gets more ridiculous by the page, with plot points involving incest, insanity, forced institutionalization and lots and lots of gay stuff. By the end, the mysteries are resolved, but it left this reader scratching his head. What the hell did I just read, was my thought at the end. Published by Harvey Weinstein, as well.
Published 4/29/26
Queen Sugar (2014)
by Natalie Baszile
St. James Parish, Louisiana
Louisiana: 24/30
Cotton gets most of the press when you consider deep south agriculture, but sugar is part of the story as well. If you don't know the story of sugar and the role it played in advancing the slavery-industrial complex in the 18th and 19th century, you can't grasp the significance of a novel about a young African American woman who suprise-inherits a sugar plantation in Louisiana, but to be fair, neither does the protagonist- a native Californian who uproots her daughter in the aftermath of the untimely death of her husband and decides to make a go of it in the deep south.
Queen Sugar is pitched somewhere between "issue novel" and "chick lit" with elements that hint at something deeper with plot points that sound like they were written for television (Queen Sugar was adapted into a movie for Oprah's OWN network). Charley, the protagonist, is primarily concerned with survival and to a lesser degree with the issues faced by her own family, specifically those of Ralph, her ne'er-do-well younger brother, the product of a childhood fling between her father and a local, mentally unstable girl during high school. Ralph has led a life filled with issues- taken from his mother in Louisiana to live with Charley and their father in California, being returned to Louisiana for being to difficult, dropping out of college a couple semesters short of his college degree (in Civil Engineering?!?!), succumbing to drug addiction in Phoenix of all places, losing his wife to an overdose, abandoning her body and taking his son back to Louisiana. It wasn't hard to tell where Ralph was headed.
I enjoyed Queen Chapters for the portions that actually dealt with the process of farming sugar cane- after reading endless books about cotton farming, it was a welcome shift. I also thought the plot was more interesting than the book Baszile wrote, but I can see where she was aiming.
Published 5/6/26
A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain (1992)
by Robert Olen Butler
Lake Charles, Louisiana
Louisiana: 25/30
I'm not sure when exactly it became a problem for an author of one race to write an entire book in the voice of a second race of which he or she is a member, but clearly it was a not problem in 1992, when A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain, which is a collection of short stories about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in Louisiana as told by a white guy whose qualification is (checks notes) being an American soldier in Vietnam during the war. Aside from that small issue this is an enjoyable collection of short stories about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in and around New Orleans. I did frequently wince when it came to Butler writing about these characters IN Vietnam or when it came to the characters talking about non-Christian Vietnamese spiritual identity.
Published 5/7/26
City of Refuge (2008)
by Tom Pizzota
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 26/30
Cit of Refuge is a Hurricane Katrina novel, specifically focusing on the aftermath and how it impacts two families, one white with one of those "only in the past" situations where an entire family of four is supported by a male breadwinner who works for an alt-weekly, and the Mom's only job is to take care of the children and complain about everything. The African American family is more interesting- a brother/sister pair with the sister's adult child. The actual description of Katrina and its aftermath as experienced by the African American protagonist (the white couple have decamped to Oxford before relocating to Chicago), is the real-life equivalent of the opening of a work of dystopian fiction, but the aftermath is not- the worst of it being a few rough days at the Superdome or Convention Center in New Orleans followed by bus relocations to anywhere- in the case of the sister of the brother/sister duo, a Christian camp in Arkansas surrounded by cotton fields.
The worst of it for the white family is listening to unsympathetic voices on early oughts' talk radio. I thought it was clear that the agenda of the writer was not to create some kind of gothic freakshow of Fema trailers and the survival of the most destitute, but rather to show a more "average" experience of having your whole life ruined overnight. All in all, it hardly seems dystopian- after the storm itself and the aftermath, pretty much everything works like it should in this book, and by the end all the characters are resuming "normal" lives, either inside New Orleans or in their new homes.
Published 5/13/26
Delicious Foods (2015)
by James Hannaham
Ovis, Louisiana
Louisiana: 27/30
I read this whole novel thinking it was set in Mississippi, not Louisiana. It very much reminded me of Paul Beatty, and I was more than a little surprised it took the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to bring Delicious Foods to my attention. Significantly, Delicious Foods contains an element of transgression in its plot, about a modern-day farm where drug-addicted African Americans are held in sort of debt peonage to a white owned corporation. Crack itself is a character here, who goes by Scotty, if I'm not mistaken, and the protagonist is Delores, a mother-of-one whose life takes a crack induced downward spiral after her do-gooder husband is murdered in vile fashion by contemporary analogues of the KKK for his organizing work in rural Louisiana.
After a trick goes bad and Delores gets a couple of her teeth knocked out, she is easily recruited to the farm, where she is provided with necessities (including crack) and a dormitory type living environment, and compelled to work on harvesting and maintaining a variety of crops, notably watermelon. Despite the marketing materials using the term "slavery" to describe the environment Delores finds herself in, the truth is more complicated, and Hannaham seems to also being working on a critique of the underlying capitalist system as much as he is making any race specific statement. On the other hand, the environment and characters are very specific to the plantation south and "second slavery" system, so there is a complexity of theme that is often absent in the works in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.
There is also nothing specifically Louisiana about Delicious Foods, rather it is a work from a third area, the delta, which crosses state lines in the north of Louisiana and the center of Mississippi.
Published 5/20/26
Meely LaBauve (2000)
by Ken Wells
Cathoula Bayou, Louisiana
Louisiana: 28/30
My ability to handle the 1,001 Novels project is solely due to the fact that I live in Los Angeles and have a Los Angeles Public Library card. As any diehard library user knows, the strength of a library is not a single branch but the ability to request books from all the different branches, or, in the case of the interlibrary loan used by the American University system, any book in any university library. The Los Angeles Public Library request feature, which you can use in the app or online, is amazing, and typically the book arrives at my local branch within a week. I mention that here because I actually had to buy a copy of Meely LaBauve off of Amazon, making it one of the few novels the Los Angeles Public Library doesn't have available.
This book is a coming-of-age novel about a child of mixed-race heritage- probably Native American and African American, though given the location and the variability of the racial implications of identifying as a Native American over the years, the question is a fraught one. Meely is a feral child, living by the Bayou with a father who is equally devoted to fishing and trapping and being a knockdown, drag-out alcoholic It's a boy's life, and the comparison of Meely to a swamp-bound Huck Finn is fair.
Published 6/3/26
Visting Hours (2012)
by Jennifer Anne Moses
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Louisiana 29/30
I am missing one book from Louisiana, and I can't figure it out for the life of me. As far as I'm aware, Visiting Hours is the last book from this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American project. Visiting Hours was last because I had to buy a copy- I was surprised didn't have this interesting novel about the grim lives of patients waiting to die in an AIDS hostel in... the 1990s? The early 2000s? It actually really reminded me of Blackouts by Justin Torres, the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction winner, which concerns a man dying of AIDS (I think) in a New Orleans SRO.
I could have used more Bayou. I'm really loving the swamp-lit of Florida, and Louisiana seems like a missed opportunity in that regard, maybe because the geographical location overlaps so completely with the Cajun population that one supersedes the other. One other conclusion I drew from this chapter is that Hurricane Katrina did real damage to the city both physically AND psychically.
Published 6/4/26
A Free Man of Color (1997)
by Barbra Hambly
New Orleans, Louisiana
Louisiana: 30/30
I found the missing Louisiana title from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, A Free Man of Color by Barbra Hambly. What happened here is I read the wrong Barbra Hambly novel- Good Man Friday, both volumes from her series detailing the exploits of free man of color and surgeon, musician and private investigator Ben January. Good Man Friday was cool because January went to Washington DC and ran into Edgar Allan Poe- the actual inventor of the detective story. The juxtaposition of the past of relative racial harmony and toleration and the (at the time of the story) new American regime, where white are free and black are not, provides much of the plot and narrative tension.
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