For two decades NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu's essays have been called "satirical gems," "subversive," "sardonic and stunning," "funny," "gonzo," "wittily poignant," and "perverse"—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly's on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost. New Orleans, Mon Amour is an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.

Collecting together Manhattan, a grimy story of depression, madness and suicide in New York City, whose appearance in the premiere issue of RAW magazine was key to the virtuoso aesthetic of the publication and three other tales of the Big Apple rendered by Tardi with the same panache as he does for Paris or the trenches of WW1 - in one spectacular volume. Also featured is the Coackroach Killer, a violent, surreal conspiracy thriller that features a striking two-colour black and red technique and remains one of the cartoonist's most startling works.

In Treasure Mountain, Louis L’Amour delivers a robust story of two brothers searching to learn the fate of their missing father—and finding themselves in a struggle just to stay alive. Orrin and Tell Sackett had come to exotic New Orleans looking for answers to their father’s disappearance twenty years before. To uncover the truth, the brothers enlisted the aid of a trailwise Gypsy and a mysterious voodoo priest as they sought to re-create their father’s last trek. But Louisiana is a dangerous land, and with one misstep the brothers could disappear in the bayous before they even set foot on the trail—a trail that led to whatever legacy their father had left behind . . . and a secret worth killing for.

This luxurious photography book on New Orleans restaurants celebrates the city's love affair with food. From the legendary Tujague's to the down-home Uglesich's, these beloved establishments are shown off in all their glory for residents and visitors alike. From the antebellum legacies of grand old restaurants like Antoine's, Commander's Palace, and Bruning's to the newcomers like Jacques-Imo's, Bayona, and Clancy's, not to mention the legion in between, the countless stories of establishments dedicated to the je ne sais quoi of dining form part of the essential history of New Orleans. This rich mix of history and evocative photographs documents an unparalleled majesty of the senses, a decadent revelry in the past, and the daily marking of pleasure. Kerri McCaffety is the first-place winner of the 1999 Society of American Travel Writers Lowell Thomas Award for a self-illustrated article. The New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association named McCaffetyis first book, Obituary Cocktail, Book of the Year for 1998. Her second book, The Majesty of the French Quarter, was called 'a vision to behold' by Gambit literary reviewer Julia Kamysz Lane, and 'easily one of the most handsome coffee table books in years' by the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger . The New Orleans Times-Picayune referred to her third book, The Majesty of St. Charles Avenue, as 'fit for royalty.' Her writing and photojournalism appear in publications including the Oxford American, Town and Country, Historic Traveler, Colonial Homes, Southern Accents, Travel Leisure, Metropolitan Home, and the Seattle Times.

New Orleans’s reputation as a decadent city stems in part from its environmental precariousness, its Francophilia, its Afro-Caribbean connections, its Catholicism, and its litany of alleged “vices,” encompassing prostitution, miscegenation, homosexuality, and any number of the seven deadly sins. An evocative work of cultural criticism, Robert Azzarello’s Three Hundred Years of Decadence argues that decadence can convey a more nuanced meaning than simple decay or decline conceived in physical, social, or moral terms. Instead, within New Orleans literature, decadence possesses a complex, even paradoxical relationship with concepts like beauty and health, progress, and technological advance. Azzarello presents the concept of decadence, along with its perception and the uneasy social relations that result, as a suggestive avenue for decoding the long, shifting story of New Orleans and its position in the transatlantic world. By analyzing literary works that span from the late seventeenth century to contemporary speculations about the city’s future, Azzarello uncovers how decadence often names a transfiguration of values, in which ideas about supposed good and bad cannot maintain their stability and end up morphing into one another. These evolving representations of a decadent New Orleans, which Azzarello traces with attention to both details of local history and insights from critical theory, reveal the extent to which the city functions as a contact zone for peoples and cultures from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Drawing on a deep and understudied archive of New Orleans literature, Azzarello considers texts from multiple genres (fiction, poetry, drama, song, and travel writing), including many written in languages other than English. His analysis includes such works of transcription and translation as George Washington Cable’s “Creole Slave Songs” and Mary Haas’s Tunica Texts, which he places in dialogue with canonical and recent works about the city, as well as with neglected texts like Ludwig von Reizenstein’s German-language serial The Mysteries of New Orleans and Charles Chesnutt’s novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C. With its careful analysis and focused scope, Three Hundred Years of Decadence uncovers the immense significance—historically, politically, and aesthetically—that literary imaginings of a decadent New Orleans hold for understanding the city’s position as a multicultural, transatlantic contact zone.

The award-winning screenplay for the classic film the New York Post hailed as “overwhelming . . . a motion picture landmark.” One of the most influential works in the history of cinema, Alain Renais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour gathered international acclaim upon its release in 1959 and was awarded the International Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics’ Award. Ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a stunning exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and inhumanity.

One of the many unique characteristics of the City of New Orleans is the way the people speak. The historical roots of the city, with its African, French, Native American, and Spanish populations, produced everyday words that are still used by some families well into the twenty-first century. Many of these words and expressions might puzzle some people who hear them today. When choosing a title for this little book, there was no difficulty selecting the one used by this writer. Since I believe it conveys the exuberance of playing on the banquette and the tranquility of sitting on the galerie. The word banquette referred to the early sidewalks that lined the streets of New Orleans. Its origin has been attributed to the fact that, in the early French colonial period, the city was plagued with pools of water that settled into wagon tracks and holes in the muddy streets and made foot traffic very difficult.