Inside Orleans Parish Prison—one of the worst jails in the country—an English class takes place, not to help inmates fulfill GED requirements, but simply to facilitate their study of literature and books. In this three-part series, Room 220‘s Ari Braverman explores the parts of the program that make it work—and make it worthwhile—from the founder [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Like any historical novel—even one set in recent history—Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is a convergence of the past and the present, the time before now rendered with the help of research but intrinsically influenced by the contemporary moment that shapes the author’s daily life. And like many novels, The Flamethrowers is [...]

Inside Orleans Parish Prison—one of the worst jails in the country—an English class takes place, not to help inmates fulfill GED requirements, but simply to facilitate their study of literature and books. In this three-part series, Room 220‘s Ari Braverman explores the parts of the program that make it work—and make it worthwhile—from the founder [...]

Inside Orleans Parish Prison—one of the worst jails in the country—an English class takes place, not to help inmates fulfill GED requirements, but simply to facilitate their study of literature and books. In this three-part series, Room 220‘s Ari Braverman explores the parts of the program that make it work—and make it worthwhile—from the founder [...]

By John Sebastian Athanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit and self-styled “master of a hundred arts,” is credited with inventing the megaphone, a pre-cursor to the computer, and (perhaps) a cat piano. His intense curiosity about the world around him motivated him to pursue studies in fields as disparate as magnetism and magic, optics and acoustics, [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Someone quipped at last weekend’s Tennessee Williams Festival that Nathaniel Rich’s new novel, Odds Against Tomorrow, was the best Katrina book set in New York City. This observation conceals a degree of truth beneath its corniness, since Rich—a New York native—began his novel about a hurricane hitting New York City six [...]

By Nick Jenisch Built as windows to the West, the cities of St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai each represent the “instant city” of their region—created by the will of a few, yet wielding an outsized influence on the modern development of their countries. In his recently released book, A History of Future Cities, New [...]

By Cate Czarnecki The historical background of perique—a tobacco varietal considered by many to be the strongest and most flavorful in the world—makes it one of the state’s more interesting, if lesser known, agricultural stories. Originally cultivated by an Acadian farmer named Pierre “Perique” Chent in the early 1800s, “le tabac de perique” involves the [...]

Veronica Kavass will present her new book, Artists in Love: From Picasso & Gilot to Christo & Jeanne-Claude, A Century of Creative and Romantic Partnerships, at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, March 4, at the Garden District Book Shop (2727 Prytania St.) and at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 5, at the Columns Hotel (3811 St. Charles [...]

By Kristina Robinson I’m an eighties baby. The Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday was signed into law by Ronald Reagan the year I was born. I’m also from New Orleans, Louisiana, one of the largest entry points in the nation for enslaved Africans, the private prison and incarceration capital of the world, and home to [...]

Rebecca Solnit will give a live presentation titled “The Speed of Thoughts: Parades, Marches, Strolls, and Other Journeys Through Places and Ideas” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 9, in Nunemaker Hall at Loyola University New Orleans. The event is free and open to the public. By Nathan C. Martin I’m tempted to say that [...]

By Ari Braverman In Moira Crone’s new sci-fi parable, The Not Yet, coastal flooding has turned the Gulf South into a wild archipelago. The New Orleans Islands are mostly a playground for Heirs, the decadent ruling class whose lives have been artificially extended for centuries and revolve around entertainment and vapid ritual.  Naturals—or “Nats,” the [...]

By Clark Allen A few days after I read My Heart is an Idiot, a new collection of personal essays by writer, This American Life contributor, and Found magazine creator Davy Rothbart, something happened that got me thinking about it. I was at a bar with some friends. I don’t remember what sparked the conversation, [...]

By jewel bush When friend and fellow MelaNated Writers Collective member Kelly Harris suggested we bring poet, photographer, and word provocateur Thomas Sayers Ellis—cofounder of the Dark Room Collective—to New Orleans, I said: “Fuck yeah!” I jumped at the chance to hear TSE, the co-founder of the Dark Room Collective, read his work live: …  [...]

By Nathan C. Martin This interview is accompanied by images that show adult content. At one point toward the middle of American Ecstasy, a new memoir in words in pictures by Barbara Nitke about the 12 years she spent working as a set photographer on pornography shoots in New York in the 80s and 90s, [...]

By Christopher Schaberg and Timothy Welsh Ian Bogost is among a group of contemporary posthumanist philosophers working in the realm of “object-oriented ontology” (OOO), which seeks to remove humans from the center of philosophical thought and value interactions between all objects—humans, as objects, included—equally. His recent book, Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be [...]

By Elizabeth Kaiser For his new book, Am I a Jew?, Theodore Ross set out on a multi-adventure odyssey to answer this complex yet fundamental question. He treats the reader to introspective telling of his childhood “double life” as a pretend non-Jew in rural Mississippi and a fake non-Christian in Manhattan, which is at turns [...]

By Ari Braverman In New Orleans, light and warmth mean flowers bloom in the Garden District all year long, but summer heat makes garbage fester until the smell pervades the city. It was in this atmosphere that I spoke with Lawrence Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. This city is characterized by [...]

By Wesley Stokes Joseph Scott Morgan worked for 17 years as a forensic death investigator for law enforcement agencies in New Orleans and Atlanta. In his new book, Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator, Morgan relates gruesome tales of true crime scene experiences while weaving in parallels from his own [...]

T. Geronimo Johnson will read along with Khaled al-Berry and Lucy Fricke at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 27, at Melvin’s (2112 St. Claude Ave.) as part of the Room 220 LIVE PROSE reading series. Details here. By Kristina Robinson Hated it. Remember that phrase from “In Living Color,” the sketch comedy series of the [...]

Carolyn Hembree will read live as part of the launch for her new book, Skinny, at 7 p.m. on September 13 at Lipstick & Lingerie Boutique in Arabi (7011 St. Claude Ave., entrance on Friscoville Avenue). By Taylor Murrow I associate Carolyn Hembree with the words “fever ribbons.” It’s a phrase I remember from seeing [...]

By Jenga Mwendo Writer Daniel Wolff came to New Orleans five months after Hurricane Katrina with filmmaker Jonathan Demme, not knowing what they’d find. They were told the story was over, that all the “good shots” had already been taken. But it seemed to them that there was a great, ongoing fight for survival that [...]

The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King By Rich Cohen Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Reviewed by Nathan C. Martin Samuel Zemurray, former president of the United Fruit company and history’s most ambitious banana magnate, has a lot in common with Daniel Plainview, the antihero of P.T. Anderson’s 2007 [...]

On May 8, Room 220 hosted a discussion between philosopher Tamler Sommers and anti-death-penalty attorney Billy Sothern at the Community Book Center. They were to discuss the philosophy of punishment. I figured it would be heady, and criminal justice issues have a particular flavor and bite in this city, so since neither Tamler nor Billy [...]

NOTE: SAM MCPHEETERS HAS CANCELED HIS TOUR. READ THE INTERVIEW ANYWAY. By Clark Allen Sam McPheeters is best known as the frontman for 90s hardcore bands Born Against and Men’s Recovery Project, and more recently Wrangler Brutes. He has put out a number of cult-classic zines, and in the past few years he has gained [...]

I’ve been exchanging emails with Matt and Jackie Sumell for over a month now, hammering out details of the reading Matt will headline this Thursday, May 3, at 7 p.m. at the Antenna Gallery Outdoor Auxiliary (2116 St. Claude Ave.). Matt is coming from Los Angeles, and the idea to bring him out began in [...]

By Cate Czarnecki Citing a failure to achieve consensus, the Pulitzer Prize committee declined to award a prize in the category of fiction this year for the first time since 1977. This decision has generated a lively debate within the American literary community over the impact of the prize—on authors as well as publishers—and its [...]

By Erik Vande Stouwe Andy Stallings is a poet of the New Poetry. He writes in and out of the vertiginous accumulation of the Modernist influence. Consistent across the work I have read is an aggressive interrogation of language. This necessitates also a confrontation with sound, nation, and self. Stallings hails from Washington state and [...]

By Sara Slaughter Antonya Nelson is always the first to admit that she’s not good with plot. Her latest novel, Bound, begins with a car crash, and centers around characters who live in the same time and place as the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill). The action slowly escalates, but never quite [...]

By Pia Z. Ehrhardt Dean Paschal grew up in a small town in southwest Georgia called Albany. Upon sensing the twilight of his official childhood in the seventh grade, he began to read every children’s book he could get his hands on while they were still, by society’s regard, age-appropriate. He was an indiscriminate reader, [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Michael J. Lee denies any connection between his work and the Southern Gothic tradition, despite characteristics in his stories that might suggest one. This is not only because he’s originally from California—which disqualifies him in the first place—but because he feels too perpetually unmoored to align with any regionalism. “My time [...]

By Michael Allen Zell Bill Zavatsky is a New York poet who has had two of his own books published since 1975. Why so few?  He’s been busy running SUN press and magazine for fifteen years, translating Surrealist poets, teaching, and playing jazz piano. Zavatsky graciously took time to answer a few questions last week [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Discussed in this essay: To Live in the South One Has to Be a Scar Lover by Maaike Gouwenberg and Joris Lindhout (eds.), published by 1646. A long and varied body of literature, film, and theory exists that addresses the United States from a European standpoint, and selections can often be [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Just as Room 220 was getting on its feet about a year ago, another breathtaking development of historical significance was taking place—the Egyptian revolution. One of the very first Room 220 posts was an interview I conducted with Andy Young and Khaled Hegazzi, co-editors of Meena Magazine, a bi-lingual literary journal [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Mutual obsession can make strange bedfellows. For Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich, it made a multimedia publishing project. The two professors of English at Loyola University New Orleans share a common infatuation with flight and its cultural and psychological accoutrements. Yakich, an accomplished poet (and previous Room 220 interviewee), possesses a [...]

By Nathan C. Martin My bookshelf is full of books I’ve never read. Books are the only things I buy on impulse, and I rarely enter a bookstore I like without buying something. Not only that, but if I like a book I’ve read, I’ll often give it away to a friend. I also move [...]

John Jeremiah Sullivan read as part of the final installment of the fall season of the Room 220 Live Prose at the Antenna Gallery reading series on Monday, November 21, 2011. He was joined by author Nathaniel Rich. Sullivan and Rich also read the following evening at Octavia Books. By Nathan C. Martin John Jeremiah [...]

By Taylor Murrow In A Meaning for Wife (Ig Publishing), a man’s wife has died from an allergic reaction to cashews. Coping with her loss and his newfound role as a single dad, he travels to his childhood home to attend his twenty-year high school reunion. While there, he stays with his parents and is [...]

By Aubrey Edwards Over 90 percent of the roughly 5,000 inmates in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola will die on its grounds, their sentences too long to live out. Warden Burl Cain and prison administrators have responded to the graying population by implementing a hospice program, through which inmates care for those who are [...]

Short story aficionado Amy Hempel will judge the 2012 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Fiction Contest (entries due Nov. 15!) and will appear as a participant in the festival, which takes place March 21 – 25. I had the pleasure of interviewing Hempel last year about her editorship of the 2010 New Stories from the South [...]

By Nathan C. Martin A few weeks ago I posted a flippant comment on Room 220 about how the narrative in Robert Olen Butler’s new novel, A Small Hotel, might in some ways resemble a real-life divorce he had gone through not long ago. Butler called me out on my erroneous post, saying I should [...]

By Nik De Dominic

I meet Wilbert Rideau at a hotel on Rampart Street, across from Armstrong Park. It is a sunny day, the weather is cool. I recognize him and his wife, Dr. Linda Labranche. They met while Rideau was still an inmate at Louisiana State Penitentiary—or “Angola”—where until 2005 he had been serving out a life sentence [...]

Pelican Bomb, an online comrade, has posted Part 2 of the two-part series I wrote about the publications of Loujon Press, a fine-press publisher based in the French Quarter in the 1960s. Loujon published two of Bukowski’s first books, four issues of its literary magazine, The Outsider, and two of Henry Miller’s books, which are [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Michael Kimball’s stylistic capacities dwarf those of most contemporary fiction writers, and he employs them with vigor to confront themes that authors have explored through the annals of literature—most explicitly: death. His first novel, The Way the Family Got Away, is a surreal and cerebral travelogue that follows a family fleeing [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Fifty years later, we’re still trying to piece together the phenomenon of the 60s—what elements were involved in that volatile time? And what can we learn from its triumphs and failures? The further we move from that point in history, the better our understanding of the context in which it occurred [...]

I wrote a piece for Pelican Bomb about Loujon Press in terms of its aesthetic achievements (and failures) as a fine-press/artistic publisher. Here’s an excerpt: The short-lived but mighty Loujon Press has become a legend among New Orleans literary circles. Admired for its publication of prominent writers at the tail end of the Beat Generation [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Open City magazine launched when I was seven years old. It ceased publication in February after a 20-year run. In his elegy to the magazine in the Wall Street Journal, editor Thomas Beller, who is now an assistant professor at Tulane, wrote about the thirty-somethings who approached him at the last [...]

The dynamic of an author interview can be radically altered if it’s conducted by a person the author knows well—most often for the better. This conversation between authors Pia Z. Ehrhardt and Dylan Landis takes that dynamic to another level, since they’re mutually inquiring about each other’s works. Each occasionally tries to out-humble or out-flatter [...]

Octavia Books owner Tom Lowenburg has taken the closing of the Borders Books on St. Charles as an impetus to invite the book-buying community to join an open discussion on what we want from our local independent bookstores. As a space that functions as a business, an event space, and a venue where people and [...]

Photo by Mario Tama The new issue of the New Orleans Review features a strong essay by Brad Richard on the issues a poet faces when writing about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The disaster prompted an engorged number of poems, essays, books, and stories, and the essay, excerpted here, explains why some of them [...]

By Taylor Murrow Endlessly fascinated and inspired by the magnetic world of fairy tales, Kate Bernheimer has dedicated her life and career to preserving the art form through her own literature and editorship. She has published novels, children’s books, and short story collections (the most recent of which is Horse, Flower, Bird), in addition to [...]

By Nathan C. Martin It’s 10 p.m. in New Orleans as I write this, and the sun is coming up on Cairo. After a day and a night of being shot at and beaten by police—attacks that have killed several and injured hundreds—protesters remain in Tahrir Square, demanding the end of President Mubarak’s 30-year regime. [...]

By Taylor Murrow By the time he was in his twenties, Tony O’Neill had traveled from his home in the UK to Los Angeles, playing music with bands like Kenickie and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. He was on tour, living the life in the States, and even met a girl and married her. This sounds [...]

By Nathan C. Martin Walker Percy is modern New Orleans’ literary behemoth. Though his influence is unlikely to eclipse Tennessee Williams’, and it’s possible John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces rivals even The Moviegoer‘s fame, no local writer from the last half of the 20th century produced a body of work that matches Percy’s. [...]