New Orleans has long been a standard reference point in American literature. It supplied the backdrop to Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Names Desire, the texture of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and the alter-ego of Ignatius in John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces.  More recently, New Orleans has been the subject of a number of non-fiction books, either about the legacy of the Katrina floods, or somehow inspired by them. The following is a very short list of some of the books currently available:

Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City, Jed Horne, New York (Random House), 2006.

Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, Christopher Cooper and Robert Block, New York (Times Books), 2006.

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Douglas Brinkley, New York (Harper Collins), 2006.

New Orleans Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City, Andrei Codrescu, Chapel Hill (Algonquin Books), 2006.

1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, Chris Rose, New York (Simon & Schuster), 2007.

Unnatural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans from Nature, Craig E. Colton, Baton Rouge (Louisiana State University Press), 2006.

What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation, (South End Press Collective), 2007.

For those who wish to read more about Prospect.1 New Orleans, please check out the following links:

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2007-07-31/cover_story.php

http://www.artinfo.com/articles/story/25550/betting_on_the_big_easy

http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2007/12/translating_the_venice_biennal.html

http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2007/12/dan_cameron_wants_to_put_new_o.html

We will update the texts as we proceed with the blog per contributors suggestions.