In this "unjustly neglected" masterpiece, Nancy Lemann gives an atmospheric account of the New Orleans trial of the Governor of Louisiana for racketeering, fraud, and bribery. This 40th anniversary edition features a new introduction by critic James Wolcott and an afterword by the author.New Orleans-born novelist Nancy Lemann returned to her hometown from Manhattan in 1985, tasked by renowned editor Tina Brown to cover Governor Edwin Edwards's two corruption trials for Vanity Fair. The work that emerged from this trip was less a straightforward account of the court proceedings and instead a masterful portrait of the politicians, their families, the lawyers, and the other reporters covering the trials, rendered in sparse, wry vignettes. Championed and edited by Gordon Lish, The Ritz of the Bayou is Lemann's sole book of nonfiction and has attained lost classic status in the decades it has languished out of print. In hazy, atmospheric scenes of...

From the author of the cult classic Lives of the Saints, a diaristic novel of middle-aged reckoning that roves from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, from court records to Don Giovanni, all of it riotously narrated by one of American fiction’s most singular voices.Delery Anhalt—middle-aged and prone, like Don Quixote, to “embroidering everything into vast ideals” but incapable (like Desdemona?) of identifying the Shakespearean villains in her life—finds herself at a crossroads. Her father and his peers, the old guard of New Orleans, are entering their twilight years. Her daughters are stepping decisively into adulthood. Delery, caught between the demands of the generations, takes stock of herself in a series of diaries that move freely between present and past: from the waning days of Covid and her employment as a virtual court monitor of criminal cases in New Orleans to the travails of daily life in Washington, DC. Throughout,...