Table Of Content
For its readers it produces a powerful effect closely akin to those which characterize the best works of fiction. Boswell’s finest artistic talent is his selection of facts, conversations, letters and events, all conveying Johnson so concretely in a literary form that Johnson himself invented with his biography of Richard Savage. City of Secrets reads with the speed of an action flick that matters.
Community
It is not possible to overemphasize the influence of Joe and Rosemary DeSalvo and Faulkner House Books in the literary and cultural life of New Orleans and the region. With the support of others and the community, they founded the nonprofit Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society to assist nascent writers. The first floor, where Faulkner slept and lived, was transformed into a bookshop and the upper three floors into a residence for Joe and Rosemary. Though he later penned famous works like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner wasn’t much of anybody yet when he moved to New Orleans, and in fact published his first work in a local journal.
Faulkner House Books: The Next Chapter – A Conversation with Joe DeSalvo
To see, to hold, and to read their correspondence was a most exhilarating treat. Located in the heart of New Orleans’s French Quarter, Faulkner House Books is a full-service new and used independent bookstore. In addition to William Faulkner, the bookstore specializes in Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Modern First Editions, Southern Americana with an emphasis on New Orleans and Louisiana-related titles, and Johnsoniana. Many of us know Joanne Sealy as a mainstay of Faulkner House Books. She sits at the head of the table in the bookshop directing and advising customers and bagging purchases. She is a calm, elegant, literate conversant and guide to reading well.
New Orleans Magazine runs story on Faulkner subscription service
And follow us on Instagram, where we’re starting to post some of our more interesting editions. As many of you know, last year my friend Devereaux and I partnered up to buy the historic Faulkner House bookstore here in New Orleans. We had a great first few months, thanks to our incredible staff, Joanne and Peter, and to the stream of visitors to the French Quarter, so many of whom venture down Pirate’s Alley to see us. We’re fortunate to have some longstanding customers who call in their orders, or trust us to choose books for them.
When bright young marrieds Permele and Garner Robinson decided to settle down, they made a unique choice, a townhouse on Pirate's Alley that included a bookstore. May the recent anniversary of his death remind those of us who treasure literature and who feel no compulsion to overexamine it for whatever reason of our responsibility to preserve it. Too many once commonly admired books have been dropped from our canon. The loss of generally shared texts puts basic communications in jeopardy. Our literary works of genius are much too valuable to society to entrust their future to experts or any other self-appointed arbiters of taste or correctness.
Number 64 is framed and hangs prominently next to the poetry cases in the bookstore. Joe and Rosemary DeSalvo are no longer the owners of Faulkner House Books. Though I’ve known about it for several weeks, it still has not settled in. More will come on Johnson and Boswell and other of my favorite writers, as well as some of my most memorable bookstore moments and encounters. In his debut novel, local author Tom Cooper delves into the heart of the Bayou in the aftermath of the BP oil spill.
Youth and early writings
His hand slides along the edge of the table to steady himself. With the exceptions of a gray beard and hair, peppered with memories of the black it used to be, Joe has not changed much in the 20 years I’ve known him. Joe DeSalvo and Rosemary James at Faulkner House Books on January 12, their last Sunday living in the building where Faulkner wrote his first novel. “We want to keep the store true to what it’s always been,” Bell added.
The stories and well-wishes, the love and support we’ve received this past year, from customers new and old — it’s all a loving testament to Joe DaSalvo. During the pandemic, it was the shop’s loyal customers as well as the shop’s subscription service that kept the doors open, even if the actual doors were closed for a while. Much of the credit should be given to store manager Joanne Sealy, who reads every book that comes into the store and has personal relationships with authors. Shopkeeper Peter Webb also has a personal relationship with regular visitors here. Joe and Rosemary called the store home and lived upstairs from the shop. Together they collected a selection of Southern literature and poetry and added a personal touch to all of their interactions here.
In As I Lay Dying, concision in expression is taken to a new level in the 19th chapter, whose five words – “My mother is a fish” —uttered by the son of a dead mother, are only one example of how the Bundren family deals with (or fails to deal with) the departure of a loved one. Set in Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the fictional yet symbolic landscape for many of Faulkner’s southern American novels, Light in August has race and identity at the heart of its narrative. Its protagonist, Joe Christmas, is the victim of both racial and religious intolerance as an orphan with mixed heritage who is raised by an abusive, puritanical farmer.
As a young boy, Faulkner attended courtroom proceedings and traveled around with his uncle, who was a practicing attorney. Faulkner, although not a lawyer, was a brilliant observer of the human condition and wrote about justice in many settings. Some great examples are found in a couple of Faulkner’s short story collections. I was already a third of the way through law school when I learned that literature could help define this ideal we call justice. Reading case law taught me to read actively, but not every judge writes with the eloquence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and judicial opinions are too narrow to define justice in a larger sense.
Wine and an array of hors d’oeuvres await on the polished antique dining table. “Elizabeth was here at the time working on a novel about young men and she showed me that she had included me in the story,” recalls Joe with a proud smile. Natural light from glass-paned doors leading to a small courtyard washes the room, flooding across the green and white marble floor. The couple’s miniature chocolate poodle, Criolla, dozes nearby on a soft fluffy pillow. As Joe and I converse, I hear customers entering and scuffling around the center table, quietly remarking to one another about interesting titles on the shelves on this cool, sunny weekday in early December. Wearing a red wool turtleneck sweater, Joe moves slowly around the corner of his writing table desk, gesturing for me to sit.
However, “Barn Burning” is perhaps one of Faulkner’s most famous short stories—first published in Harper’s in 1939 and now found in Faulkner’s Selected Short Stories (Modern Library, 2012)—that serves as a prequel to the “Snopes Trilogy” (The Hamlet; The Town; The Mansion). When I recommend this book to customers, they are often wary when I describe it as a work of science fiction. Somehow, sci fi has become a dirty word among a certain literary set, signifying socially awkward middle schoolers and Star Trek conventions. I want to join a growing group of readers in making a case for sci fi as an essential literary genre, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is a perfect example. Key joined us in October for the 2015 Words & Music conference and signed a case of his books.
As Joe and I were catching up, Rosemary was in uptown New Orleans, overseeing the preparation of their next home overlooking Audubon Park. Kelly Massicot writes in the current edition of New Orleans Magazine about our new subscription service! After Joe and Rosemary retired, Garner Robinson and Devereaux Bell bought the shop in October 2019.
Books by New Orleans Authors - NewOrleans.Com
Books by New Orleans Authors.
Posted: Sat, 28 Oct 2017 22:15:37 GMT [source]
Come buy one, and laugh as you read it aloud to your family over the holidays. Two women entered with plastic beads jangling around their necks. As I directed them to our New Orleans history section and reached for one of my favorites, Lyle Saxon’s Gumbo Ya-Ya (70th Anniversary Edition, River Road Press), a bearded man flashed by our glass doors playing his arms like a trombone. He flashed by again, marching high-knees, pumping an arm up and down with the jazz beat and tooting a loose fist at his mouth. If you feel that any of these services may meet your needs, give me a call. I'd love to hear about you, your books, and what you want to have happen in your life as an author.
As Toni Morrison says on the dust jacket, it is “required reading.” It is the most important book of year. The townhouse layout is traditional, with small rooms stacked atop each other behind a narrow façade. A winding cypress staircase, originally in the courtyard, is now situated down an alley and around the corner. However, neither the alley nor the now-enclosed stairs are walled off from the bookstore.
The poet constantly doubles back over and around the same themes and images, creating a kind of dreamscape of Southern mountain surreality. There is something undeniably sublime about the best of Stanford’s work. This is the kind of book to read before bed, so that his images may permeate your dreams. What I didn’t say was, I had very important reasons for throwing my child into the ceiling fan, and those reasons were that I wanted to see what would happen. This was my responsibility, as a man, to endanger the people I love in the service of knowledge that seems important at the time.
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