Part of the story behind Brooke Champagne’s astonishingly good essay collection, NOLA Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy (UGa Press 2024) is a dog. Well, not just Nola herself, the “brindled, emaciated pit-boxer” that Champagne and her husband adopted after Hurricane Katrina, but moreso her particular expression, born of jealousy and/or inadequacy, when […]
June Read of the Month: “NOLA Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy” by Brooke Champagne
June 4, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Gnostic Vibes: Revisiting Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins” (Part I)
October 10, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Essay by Louis Gallo All Percy quotations from Walker Percy, Love In The Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), first edition/first printing. The protagonist of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, the “Bad Catholic” of the novel’s subtitle, is a […]
“Rear View,” An Essay by Louis Gallo
July 24, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Essay by Louis Gallo A history with scandalous cameo personalities* While away in grad school I sent weekly book reviews to Vieux Carre Courier, an alternative, low-budget newspaper owned by lawyer Jim Derbes and his wife, Ginny. Jim was an old friend from my early teen years. We had met, weirdly enough, over the forty […]
“Assassination at Bayou Sauvage,” by DJ Donaldson
October 26, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl DJ Donaldson is the author of a series of Andy Broussard / Kit Franklyn mysteries, most of which have been digitally published in the last half-decade or so. Donaldson’s mystery is readable, but if placed side-by-side with James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels, there are notable differences. Burke, for example, […]
September Read of the Month: “Book of the Beloved,” by Carolyn Haines
September 6, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro The amazing Carolyn Haines is at it again. The compelling, complex and darkly fascinating Book of the Beloved illustrates all over again just how talented and versatile the award-winning Haines is as a writer. Beloved is a book you won’t be able to put down, Southern to the core, and […]
“Bill Corrington, From Poetry to ‘Killer Bees’: A Personal Interview,” by Louis Gallo
June 8, 2016 by Leave a Comment
A personal interview transcribed from long out-of-print and defunct The Courier—the Weekly Newspaper of New Orleans (Nov 27-Dec3, 1975) in hopes of greater dissemination circa 2016. —Louis Gallo This piece is reproduced directly from the crumbling newsprint pages of the original Courier edition. It describes a very much alive Bill Corrington in 1975. Some current […]