Book: New Orleans, Mon Amour

by Andrei Codrescu (2006).

This book collects twenty years of Codrescu's writings on New Orleans, starting in 1985 and taking us all the way up to the present. Only four short pieces focus on the city after Katrina (and they are, I think, the weakest of the bunch).

Codrescu, who contributes every once in a while to NPR, turns a poetic eye on his adopted city, and it suits the myth of NOLA well. Those of us who never saw the city before the big storm will never really know if things were the way he presents them. But it's fun to imagine that they were.