Rhythm & Booze
Megan Elias2025-10-31T11:31:47-04:00Arranged in four parts–each associated with a particular Louisiana city–the poems in Rhythm & Booze trace the hardships and uncertainties, as well as the moments of unexpected sublimity, of a life lived in a continuous struggle between fresh starts and destructive old patterns.…
A Forever Kind of Love
Megan Elias2025-10-31T11:29:12-04:00In Gauthier, love isn’t just found. It’s forever.
Mya Dubois left Gauthier, Louisiana determined never to look back. Broadway gave her the career she dreamed of, but coming home means facing the one thing she cannot design her way around… the man who shattered her heart.…
A Lesson Before Dying
Megan Elias2025-10-31T11:26:10-04:00NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.…
The Keepers of the House
Megan Elias2025-12-02T12:44:34-05:00Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, The Keepers of the House is Shirley Ann Grau’s masterwork, a many-layered indictment of racism and rage that is as terrifying as it is wise.
Entrenched on the same land since the early 1800s, the Howlands have, for seven generations, been pillars of their Southern community.…
Interview with the Vampire
Megan Elias2025-12-02T12:43:54-05:00The spellbinding classic that started it all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author—the inspiration for the hit television series
“A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller . . . Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth—the education of the vampire.”—…
Naked Ladies
Megan Elias2025-10-31T11:19:10-04:00Capturing the breadth of Julie Kane’s poetics across nearly four decades–formalist and neo-confessional, steeped in both Boston Irish-American and New Orleans cultures–Naked Ladies displays the full range and achievement of her work. Gathered here in one volume are selections from Kane’s five previous collections, including her long-out-of-print first book and her subsequent winners of the National Poetry Series and Donald Justice Poetry Prize.…
A Streetcar Named Desire
Megan Elias2025-10-31T11:16:28-04:00It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared–57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.…
The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You
Megan Elias2025-10-31T11:13:07-04:00Maurice Carlos Ruffin has an uncanny ability to reveal the hidden corners of a place we thought we knew. These perspectival, character-driven stories center on the margins and are deeply rooted in New Orleanian culture.
In “Beg Borrow Steal,” a boy relishes time spent helping his father find work after coming home from prison; in “Ghetto University,” a couple struggling financially turns to crime after hitting rock bottom; in “Before I Let Go,” a woman who’s been in NOLA for generations fights to keep her home; in “Fast Hands, Fast Feet,” an army vet and a runaway teen find companionship while sleeping under a bridge; in “Mercury Forges,” a flash fiction piece among several in the collection, a group of men hurriedly make their way to an elderly gentleman’s home, trying to reach him before the water from Hurricane Katrina does; and in the title story, a young man works the street corners of the French Quarter, trying to achieve a freedom not meant for him.…