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The Reading Life With Alyn Shipton And Gwen Thompkins

This week on The Reading Life: British jazz scholar Alyn Shipton and Music Inside Out's Gwen Thompkins talk about "Danny Barker:A Life in Jazz," a beautifulnew edition of this classic from the Historic New Orleans Collection. And Susan looks back at the literary year.

**Lagniappe Audio**

trl_122716_gwenalan_outtake_depart_and_life_on_road.mp3
Gwen Thompkins and Alyn Shipton talk about Danny Barker's departure from the Cab Calloway band and also the hardships of Danny's life on the road.

Looking back at 2016: The Year in Books

By Susan Larson

For me, every year is a good year in Louisiana books, but this year seemed particularly rich. There was a lot to celebrate.

For starters, Shakespeare’s 400th birthday! Tulane University hosted the First Folio, complete with a second line for Shakespeare in April at Tulane, then a band of Tulanians traveled to Stratford to second line for the bard in his birthplace.

And I think we can take civic pride in Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize – after all, a good bit of Chronicles takes place during his time in the city. And Bob Dylan is the one who wrote, “In New Orleans, everything seems like a good idea” and “There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better.” Come on back, Bob. Any time.

As always, Festivals were a high point of the literary year: A new festival made its debut this year – Megan Burns and Bill Lavender are the co-founders of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, which was held in April. Plans are well underway for 2017’s Festival which will take place in April 21-23. Two great traditions in the making: performances by poets with bands, one of the best ideas EVER, and a grand finale reading at the Maple Leaf Bar.

Then in September, Dillard University hosted the Black Arts Movement Festival, featuring Ishmael Reed, Haki Madhubuti, and Askia Toure, leading lights of the Black Arts Movement, and a host of African-American scholars.

September also brought that gigantic gathering of mystery writers and fans, Bouchercon, to New Orleans. The Diana Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction this year went to Sara Paretsky for her Distinguished Body of Work, 19 novels featuring Chicago P.I. V.I. Warshawski, and Christine Carbo for her debut novel, The Wild Inside.

The grand old festivals marked significant anniversaries this year. Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival celebrated its 30th year in March, with headliner guests Mary Badham, who played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, and Estelle Parsons.  Words and Music: A Literary Feast in New Orleans, marked 25 years in November, bringing noted Mexican journalist Jorge Hernandez to town. Hernandez edited Sun, Stone, and Shadows, a landmark anthology of Mexican short fiction, this year’s Big Read selection. The 13th Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge honored New Orleans historian and biographer Christina Vella with the Louisiana Writer Award. The New Orleans Book Festival in City Park and the New Orleans Book Fair in Clouet Gardens rounded out the year.

One Book One New Orleans continued its great work this year with the selection of The Baby Dolls: Challenging the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition, by Kim Vaz-Deville of Xavier University. What a difference Kim has made in our community with her ground-breaking scholarship!

The indie book and publishing scene got a lift with the addition of the beautiful new bookstore, The French Library, on Magazine St. and Crescent City Books’ new publishing imprint.

The book scene was diverse and plentiful. In mysteries, there were lots of new series entries from old favorites -- Nevada Barr, James Lee Burke, Greg Herren, Bill Loehfem, Jean Redmann – and a second noir novel from Michael Allen Zell, rapidly becoming a new favorite.

Debut literary fiction was also wonderful this year, with work from Peyton Burgess’s The Fry Pans Aren’t Sufficing (which gets the award for unforgettable title); Matthew Griffin’s exquisite story of a closeted gay couple, Hide; and Nicholas Mainieri’s The Infinite, which moved between post-Katrina New Orleans and a Mexico in mid -drug war.

It was a breakout year for Yuri Herrera with his Transmigration of Bodies, which received international acclaim. Katy Simpson Smith solidified her ever growing reputation with her unforgettable second novel, Free Men. John Gregory Brown’s story of redemption, A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, was one of the year’s best reads, along with Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River. Adrian Van Young’s Shadows in Summerland was a spooky tale of spiritualism behind the scenes.  And I couldn’t leave out that wonderful anthology, Monday Nights: Stories from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans, edited by Fredrick Barton and Joanna Leake, which celebrates 25 years of the UNO Creative Writing Workshop.

Gorgeous picture books were everywhere. Erin Greenwald continued her work on the Company of the Indies.  Susan Tucker’s City of Remembering: A History of Genealogy in New Orleans, was a gorgeous tour of resources available to researchers in various institutions throughout the city. John Kemp surveyed 37 landscape artists in Expressions of Place: The Contemporary Louisiana Landscape, Peggy Scott Laborde and Louis Hodges explored some memorable moments in The Fairgrounds through the Lens. Roulhac Toledano and Scott Veazey rescued the legacy of artist Martha Wright Ambrose, while River Road Publishing made a splash with Simon of New Orleans, by Yvonne Perret, a tribute to the work of Simon Hardeveld. Gwen Thompkins wrote the introduction to A Life in Jazz by Danny Barker, edited by Alyn Shipton, a beautiful new edition of a New Orleans classic. Photographer Philip Gould and writer Herman Fuselier joined forces for the beautiful Ghosts of Good Times: Louisiana Dance Halls Past and Present.  And artist Alex Beard created one of the most elegant books I’ve ever seen – A Brush with Nature: Abstract Naturalism and the Painting of Life.

There were notable poetry debuts by Rickey Laurentiis, Clint Smith, Nicole Eiden, and Andrea Panzeca, along with wonderful new books by already established poets Alison Pelegrin, author of Waterlines, and Carolyn Hembree, author of Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine, and Other Ways to Escape a Plague.

Significant nonfiction: Nigel Hamilton continued his multi-volume biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Patrick Many gave us a brief and insightful biography of Bill Clinton.  The Story of Dan Bright: Crime, Corruption and Injustice in the Crescent City, written by Dan Bright and Justin Nobel, told the jaw-dropping story of a man unjustly convicted of murder, while John DeSantis chronicled The Thibodaux Massacre.  Long Shot: A Soldier, A Senator, A Serious Sin, An Epic Louisiana Election, by Tyler Bridges and Jeremy Alford, told a great tale of Louisiana politics. Anne Boyd Rioux’s stand-out work of scholarship, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist earned front-page treatment in The New York Times Book Review. Watch for her next book – a history of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – I’m grateful to Anne for taking me back to that childhood favorite. Lara Naughton’s unflinching memoir, The Jaguar Man, gave us all a model of human compassion. Novelist/memoirist Jesmyn Ward, inspired by James Baldwin, edited the landmark anthology The Fire this Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race. And LSU professor Nancy Isenberg made bestseller lists with White Trash: A History of Class in America.

As the year ends, we see New Orleans regulars out with new candidates for the bestseller lists. In The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, Michael Lewis chronicles the friendship of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their influential insights into the process of decision-making. And Anne Rice takes her most famous character to fascinating new places in Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis.

I went to many readings this year but two of them will stay with me forever. Family and friends turned out in droves to hear poet Clint Smith read from his first book, Counting Descent. If you haven’t heard one of Clint Smith’s inspiring TED talks, do yourself a favor and listen in.

And the year ended on a real grace note with Michael Tisserand’s long-awaited Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White, the story of the New Orleans native who created Krazy Kat. This is my pick for best local book this year. Tisserand, who has already brought us such fine books as Kingdom of Zydeco and Sugar Cane Academy, offers a star turn in this biography. It is a love story of comics and newspapers and a serious look at American idiosyncrasy and racial prejudice, as well as a provocative tale of one man’s secret life. What did Tisserand value about his subject? His sense of wonder and delight – that’s something the readers of this book will share too.

And that’s the last page for now. So, until next year, next week, keep reading!

The Reading Life in 2010, Susan Larson was the book editor for The New Orleans Times-Picayune from 1988-2009. She has served on the boards of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and the New Orleans Public Library. She is the founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Women's National Book Association, which presents the annual Diana Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction.. In 2007, she received the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities lifetime achievement award for her contributions to the literary community. She is also the author of The Booklover's Guide to New Orleans. If you run into her in a local bookstore or library, she'll be happy to suggest something you should read. She thinks New Orleans is the best literary town in the world, and she reads about a book a day.