Life in the Wake: Fiction from Post-Katrina New Orleans | Bill Loehfelm, Sarah K Inman, ... |...

Life in the Wake: Fiction from Post-Katrina New Orleans | Bill Loehfelm, Sarah K Inman, ... | Life In The Wake

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Life in the Wake: ...

	Life in the Wake: Fiction from Post-Katrina New Orleans Bill Loehfelm, Sarah K Inman, ... Nolafugees Press, 2007 - 276 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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A collection of short fiction set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Life Goes On

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of short stories by various New Orleans authors who penned these fictional accounts of life in the Big Easy after Hurricane Katrina.

Life In The Wake

I loved this book. It's ironic that a book labelled "fiction" has given me the most believable and credible stories of life in and around New Orleans during Katrina. The authors write with a passion that cannot be duplicated by those of us who experienced this piece of history from a geographic distance and through the eyes of The Weather Channel. It is very clear that these authors were there and, thankfully, lived to share their stories.

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Excerpts From a

Excerpts from David Winkler-Schmit's article 'The Next Wave':

While this new collection, self-published and featuring many of the Web site's contributors, is set squarely within the confines of fiction, it often provides a true sense of what life is like in post-Katrina New Orleans. Unlike a magazine or newspaper article, the stories aren't forced to consider the 'big picture," nor do they require a peppering of current facts and statistics. Instead they can focus on individual characters like a mother and her two kids as they go trick-or-treating through the streets of the Marigny in Anne Gisleson's 'Boo.' The young mom is trying to preserve some sense of normalcy for her kids, but " as any parents who took their children out into New Orleans' streets for Halloween 2006 can tell you " the journey was anything but normal, with darkened streets, National Guard patrols handing out candy and a gang of marauding 12-year-olds. The family itself seems out of place in this post-storm world and, as Gisleson writes, 'huddle close on the narrow sidewalk around the stroller, trying to fit in the frame."

Other stories effectively recall the bleak days immediately following the levee failures. Joel Farrelly's 'Shingled Island" opens up with a young man trapped on a rooftop surrounded by floodwaters as he begins to try to list the reasons why he shouldn't swallow his mother's entire bottle of OxyContin. He doesn't get too far before he remembers whose pills they are: 'Not my mother's, I remind myself. My dead mother's. And right there the list gets shorter." He can hear a helicopter flying nearby, but with so much death coupled with his own developing apathy he wonders: Is being rescued really what he wants?

As the anthology progresses, immediate survival becomes less tenuous, but that's not to say that life in the city is any easier. Instead of drowning in the streets, some people, like the first-person narrator in Tara Jill Ciccarone's 'Reality is a Trigger," ingest whatever " cocaine, alcohol and bad relationships " to avoid this new damaged reality. Not all of the strange behavior patterns can be attributed to the post-storm malaise, but that doesn't make living with the mentally ill any easier as Jennifer A. Kuchta relates in 'Stray." About the only saving grace Kuchta's main character, Lisa, can find in her nearly empty neighborhood is that when her bi-polar lover, Meredith, explodes in a manic fit 'even with the windows open to air out the house, no one will hear her scream."

The efforts [of the collective writers] should be applauded, the failures understood and the successes regarded not only for the talented writing, but as reminders of the truth that lies below daily life in Katrina's wake.

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