Here are 75 books that French Quarter Fiction fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am an award-winning author of The Hat Diaries fantasy adventure series and the Freeda the Frog children’s book series. The Hat Diaries The Secret Life of Ryan Rigbee is the first book in The Hat Diaries trilogy. The Hat Diaries collection is written for teens and adults, expanding readers’ imaginations as they enter Ryan’s secret world. The Freeda the Frog™ books focus on acceptance for every type of family and comfort children as they experience real-life situations. I frequently do author events, radio & TV interviews, and podcasts. I am also a practicing attorney, certified yoga instructor, and the proud mother of a blended family of five children.
Interview with the Vampire is rather dark yet mesmerizing at the same time.
I love stories that take your mind to another world, and this one is at the top of the list. To be perfectly honest, I never really had any interest in learning about the mysterious world of immortal vampires until I read this book. Just remember that this book is intended for mature audiences due to its dark and mature themes.
I recommend this book because it touches upon many exciting subjects, including the desire for immortality and it takes an interesting perspective about humanity through a supernatural lens. This book is an absolute must-read that will leave you chilled to the bone and spellbound.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Anne Rice, this sensuously written spellbinding classic remains 'the most successful vampire story since Bram Stoker's Dracula' (The Times)
In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life - the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood.
When Interview with the Vampire was published the Washington Post said it was a 'thrilling, strikingly original work of the imagination . . . sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, always unforgettable'. Now, more than forty years since its release, Anne…
My love of mysteries began with Nancy Drew books. As I read more mysteries over the years, I finally decided it was time for me to write my own. A setting came to me immediately—New Orleans. I fell in love with the city through the Anne Rice and Julie Smith’s books. To write my cozy mystery series, I read all kinds of books. I read them for pleasure, but to make sure the details are correct in my books, The French Quarter Mysteries. I’m able to enjoy New Orleans through my sleuth, Samantha. It’s the next best thing to being there myself.
In New Orleans, police detective Skip Langdon searches for the killer of Rex, King of Carnival for this year's Mardi Gras, a member of the powerful but tragic St. Amant family
Being from Upstate New York I went to college at Cornell University but headed off to New Orleans as soon as I could. By and by I became an instructor at Delgado Community College. Always a big fan of the city’s amazing historic cemeteries, when teaching a world architectural history class, I took the class to the Metairie Cemetery where I could show the students real examples of every style from Ancient Egyptian to Modern American. After coming to Texas State University, San Marcos (30 miles from Austin), I went back to New Orleans on sabbatical in 2013 and wrote The Cemeteries of New Orleans.
Written by accomplished historian Carolyn Morrow Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess tells the true story of Voodoo queen Marie Laveau based on extensive archival research.
In telling her readers about this Creole woman of color who was deeply embedded in the culture of New Orleans in the 1800s, we learn the real story of a woman who was often glorified and denigrated by the press and by local authors who wrote many fantastical tales about her life misleading many about her character and her religion.
Legendary for an unusual combination of spiritual power, beauty, charisma, showmanship, intimidation, and shrewd business sense, Marie Leveau also was known for her kindness and charity, nursing yellow fever victims and ministering to condemned prisoners, and her devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. In separating verifiable fact from semi-truths and complete fabrication, Carolyn Morrow Long explores the unique social, political, and legal setting in which the lives of Laveau's African and European ancestors became intertwined in nineteenth-century New Orleans.
My love of mysteries began with Nancy Drew books. As I read more mysteries over the years, I finally decided it was time for me to write my own. A setting came to me immediately—New Orleans. I fell in love with the city through the Anne Rice and Julie Smith’s books. To write my cozy mystery series, I read all kinds of books. I read them for pleasure, but to make sure the details are correct in my books, The French Quarter Mysteries. I’m able to enjoy New Orleans through my sleuth, Samantha. It’s the next best thing to being there myself.
A unique city such as New Orleans should have unique guidebooks. Fear Dat is just that.
While the book gives the usual tourist information about hotels, restaurants, shops, and tours, it has so much more. Fear Dat is full of stories of the cemeteries, Voodoo, ghosts, vampires, and more.
Whether it’s your first visit or your twentieth, this book will get you ready for a trip to the Crescent City.
Fear Dat New Orleans explores the eccentric and often macabre dark corners of America's most unique city. In addition to detailed histories of bizarre burials, ghastly murders, and the greatest concentration of haunted places in America, Fear Dat features a "bone watcher's guide" with useful directions of who's buried where, from Marie Laveau to Ruthie the Duck Girl. You'll also find where to buy the most authentic gris-gris or to get the best psychic reading.
The Huffington Post tagged Michael Murphy's first book Eat Dat, about the city's food culture, the #1 "essential" book to read before coming to New…
We grew up in predominantly white communities and came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. As academics, we focused on issues of race in our research and teaching. Yet, despite our reading and writing about race, we still hadn’t made a connection to our own lives and how our white privilege shielded us and made us complicit in perpetuating racial inequities. We didn’t fully see our role in white supremacy until we adopted our sons. Becoming an interracial family and parenting Black sons taught us about white privilege and the myriad ways that Blacks confront racism in education, criminal justice, health care, and simply living day-to-day.
A memoir that haunted both of us about Broom’s love for the New Orleans house she grew up in, her family, and a neighborhood torn apart by the institutional racism embedded in banking practices, zoning laws, highway development, and other corporate and government policies and practices.
Broom’s mother purchased the house in 1961 in a then “promising” neighborhood. Over the years, the neighborhood was cut off from the city by the growth of the interstate highway, which left this largely Black area in decline from years of indifference by New Orleans elected officials. The house was eventually destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
The book provides a harrowing description of the destructive effects of institutional racism.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
'A major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade' New York Times Book Review
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would…
I have been a fan of romantic suspense since I was a teen (many decades ago) and started writing my DAG Team Series in 2016. I adore everything about this genre – the puzzles, the intrigue and how they affect the budding relationship between the main characters. Dating is difficult when you are trying to catch a killer or on the run! Despite the central mystery, the focus is on the romance between the couple. The issues serve to add a layer of non-sexual tension.
The first in the Doucet series and a real nail-biter. A killer has been set free and the couple must team up to catch him. The trail leads them through the bayous of Louisiana and the author does a great job at escalating the tension between them and the environment.
A botched investigation - and a killer walks free...
The death of a beautiful woman ... an arrogant man who claimed to be her suitor but was probably her murderer ... a cop accused of planting evidence ... and a town steeped in secrets and shadows.
Deputy Annie Broussard is still haunted by the case of Pamela Bichon. The killer walked free, and Annie can't forget the sight of Pamela's mutilated body.
But her obsessive search for justice lands her with a dilemma where she must defend or accuse a fellow cop ...
I was in the fourth grade when JFK was assassinated. I grew up in the late 1960s as conspiracy theories about ‘who killed Kennedy’ flourished. Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald made me suspect the mafia played a role. After Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 JFK film, I convinced a publisher to allow me to reexamine the assassination. I did not expect to solve the case. Halfway through my research, however, I realized there was an answer to ‘who killed Kennedy.’ It was not what I had expected. I discovered that the story of how a 24-year-old sociopath armed with a $12 rifle managed to kill the president was a far more fascinating one than I could have ever envisioned.
In a similar vein to False Witness, Litwin not only exposes the shortcomings of the Garrison investigation into the JFK murder but in the process uncovers the fraud and false information that are cited to support some of the currently popular conspiracy theories about the assassination. It is filled with new information from Litwin’s own extensive research.
Fred Litwin exposes the truth about Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney, who ‘solved’ the JFK assassination in 1967.
On the Trail of Delusion shows how Garrison persecuted an innocent gay man in order to spout his crazy conspiracy theories. There is also a touch of bribery and intimidation, the story of his attempt to charge a dead man with being a grassy knoll assassin, the former Marine he believed was a ‘second Oswald,’ several con men who turned the tables and fooled Garrison, the use of truth serum and hypnosis to recover memories, the ugly story of Oliver…
I have written widely on themes related to race, slavery, 19th-century politics, the Civil War, and its aftermath. The Reconstruction era has sometimes been called America’s “Second Founding.” It is imperative for us to understand what its architects hoped to accomplish and to show that their enlightened vision encompassed the better nation that we are still striving to shape today. The great faultline of race still roils our country. Our forerunners of the Reconstruction era struggled to bridge that chasm a century and a half ago. What they fought for still matters.
This is a fitting companion to Ball’s earlier book Slaves in the Family, a meticulous account of his paternal ancestors’ slave-owning history and their biracial progeny.
In this book, Ball, a talented and engaging writer, dives deep into the buried story of a maternal forbearer in New Orleans, Constant Lecorgne, a working-class white creole. With novelistic flair, Ball takes us along with Lecorgne in his peregrinations through Louisiana’s violent and chaotic reactionary politics in the 1860s and 1870s. Ball faced a daunting challenge: to humanize Lecorgne without either sugarcoating his reprehensible behavior or forgiving him for it.
Few books I’ve read have so vividly captured the mentality of outspoken white supremacist “foot soldier.” I was often repelled by Lecorgne, but I wanted to keep reading. This is an essential book if we’re to begin to understand why ordinary white men were willing, even eager, to participate in the racist counter-revolution…
"A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance." ―Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review
A 2020 NPR staff pick | One of The New York Times' thirteen books to watch for in August | One of The Washington Post's ten books to read in August | A Literary Hub best book of the summer| One of Kirkus Reviews' sixteen best books…
Laura Freeman is a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honoree. Her work has been recognized with an NAACP Image Award, reached the New York Times Best Seller List, been honored by the Society of Illustrators, the Georgia Center For The Book, and in the Annuals for Communication Arts and American Illustration. She has illustrated over thirty children’s books, most of them biographies.
This brilliant book tells the story of a lesser-known piece of African American history. Congo Square in New Orleans was a place where slaves were free to set up an open market, sing, dance, and play music...but only on Sundays for half a day. If you ever feel down this is a reminder of how indomitable the human spirit can be in the face of unspeakable adversity.
Winner of a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016 A School Library Journal Best Book of 2016: Nonfiction Starred reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and The Horn Book Magazine A Junior Library Guild Selection
This poetic, nonfiction story about a little-known piece of African American history captures a human's capacity to find hope and joy in difficult circumstances and demonstrates how New Orleans' Congo Square was truly freedom's heart.
Being from Upstate New York I went to college at Cornell University but headed off to New Orleans as soon as I could. By and by I became an instructor at Delgado Community College. Always a big fan of the city’s amazing historic cemeteries, when teaching a world architectural history class, I took the class to the Metairie Cemetery where I could show the students real examples of every style from Ancient Egyptian to Modern American. After coming to Texas State University, San Marcos (30 miles from Austin), I went back to New Orleans on sabbatical in 2013 and wrote The Cemeteries of New Orleans.
I discovered and used The World That Made New Orleans as a source for my book.
Upon opening the book, I was gleefully surprised to discover what an informative, interesting, and fun read it is. Sublette describes the French origins of the city in the early 1700s which involved wild parties, debauchery, tragic exploratory expeditions, and a massive Ponzi scheme that used Louisiana and the fictional gold mines there to defraud most every rich person in France, eventually crashing the entire French economy.
He then took me on a thrilling journey through the Spanish and early American periods to quadroon balls, Congo Square, and so many other fascinating places. I knew the city’s history was interesting, but reading The World That Made New Orleans blew me away.
Named one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune. Winner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Awarded the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for 2008.
New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance.
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