New Orleans

The hell of the antebellum South: Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward, reviewed

21 October 2023 9:00 am

Teenage Annis and her enslaved mother endure beatings and rape as they are marched in chains to New Orleans to be sold to the latest brutal plantation owner

The dazzling, devious, doomed sound of James Booker

10 October 2020 9:00 am

Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died…

The dark underbelly of New Orleans revealed by Hurricane Katrina

1 August 2020 9:00 am

Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book…

The torrential rain in Anbara Salam’s New Hebrides proves hellish. Credit: Getty Images

A review of debut novels — from Lisa Halliday, Margaret Wilkersen Sexton, Matthew Klam and Anbara Salam

2 June 2018 9:00 am

Publication of a debut novel is an experience comparable with the birth of a first child. Literary gestation is normally…

Cypress swamp alongside the river

Mississippi and the Delta are the high-tar, full strength Deep South

2 January 2016 9:00 am

Explore Mississippi and the Delta before they’re rebranded, says James Walton

New Orleans is being reborn (without its Confederate statues)

7 November 2015 9:00 am

The last time I was in New Orleans was during the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico when…

Did Hurricane Katrina have an angel of mercy — or an angel of death? 

15 February 2014 9:00 am

On 28 August 2005 — Sheri Fink’s Day One — Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. The National Weather Service warned…