| A new novel, The Oyster Diaries, and a new edition of the author’s cult-classic debut, Lives of the Saints—both available at 25% off for the next three days Nancy LemannDelery Anhalt—middle-aged and prone to “embroidering everything into vast ideals” but incapable of identifying the Shakespearean villains in her life—finds herself at a crossroads. Her father and his peers, the old guard of New Orleans, are entering their twilight years. Her daughters are stepping decisively into adulthood. Delery, caught between the demands of the generations, takes stock of herself in a series of diaries that move freely between present and past: from the waning days of Covid and her employment as a virtual court monitor of criminal cases in New Orleans to the travails of daily life in Washington, DC. Throughout, she revisits what she calls her lions at the gate: her insecurity, ego, annoyance, operatic wrath (felt most keenly toward bad houseguests), and remorse.
The Oyster Diaries, the latest novel by the incomparable Nancy Lemann, is a funny and poignant portrayal of the vicissitudes of adulthood that sees the return, from her legendary debut, Lives of the Saints, of the heroic wastrel Claude Collier. This is an exuberant, indignant, insightful performance, and an irresistible addition to the books that have made Lemann one of the keenest, most engaging, and simply beloved of American writers at work today. “[Lemann’s] work evokes something old-fashioned in its manner and tone, and this proves to be a way she keeps herself from being subsumed in the clichés of modern culture even as she is examining it.... Though she is describing us, we feel she is looking at us from another time, through the lens of the ages.”
—Susan Minot Nancy Lemann
Introduction by Geoff DyerNancy Lemann’s voice is one of the most unusual in American fiction, unabashedly digressive, weirdly and wonderfully confiding, as witty as it is melancholy, an endless surprise. Hers is a voice born of and at odds with her native New Orleans, a voice that takes on and wonders at the ramshackle realities not just of the deep South but of America. Lives of the Saints, her first book, was a revelation of new talent. Reappearing here, several decades later, it is simply a revelation.
“Claude Collier made the world seem kind,” says Louise Brown, beginning a tale of Violent Love, Breakdowns, Moods, and Felonious Drunkenness that floats from one lush, green, sweltering New Orleans evening to another. When Louise returns home after four years of college in New England, she bemusedly finds herself reimmersed in New Orleans society’s “wastrel-youth contingent.” At the center of this gin-fueled hurricane is Claude Collier, rumpled, accident-prone, supremely sweet—and desperate. For Claude, Louise is his steadying focus; for Louise, Claude is the only man who can cause her heart to “break into a million pieces on the floor.” “Think of Lives of the Saints as a long poem―a hysterically funny poem that is also beautifully written.... Words are slung about recklessly, piled in staggering heaps, and what emerges from them is an almost hypnotic portrait of unforgettable people in a strange and magnificent city.”
―Anne Tyler, The New Republic Lives of the Saints will be the May 2026 selection of
the NYRB Classics Book Club. Events with Nancy LemannFriday, March 13, at 11am CT
The New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University
Panel discussion with Patricia Lockwood, Danzy Senna, and C. J. Farley
More information here
Wednesday, April 1, at 5pm CT
Lemuria Books (Jackson, MS)
In conversation with Snowden Wright
More information here
Thursday, April 2, at 6pm CT
Square Books at The Powerhouse (Oxford, MS)
A reading and discussion for the Thacker Mountain Radio Hour
More information here
Thursday, April 9, at 7pm ET
McNally Jackson Seaport (NYC)
In conversation with Susan Minot
More information here
Friday, April 17, at 7pm ET
Politics and Prose at 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW (Washington, DC)
In conversation with Terence Monmaney
More information here
Wednesday, May 6, at 6pm CT
The Garden District Book Shop (New Orleans, LA)
Reading and signing
More information available soon
Thursday, May 7, at 6pm CT
Pass Christian Books (Pass Christian, MS)
Reading and signing
More information here Next month, Hub City Press will publish a fortieth-anniversary edition of Nancy Lemann’s sole nonfiction book, The Ritz of the Bayou, “an atmospheric account of the New Orleans trial of the Governor of Louisiana for racketeering, fraud, and bribery.” |
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario