Orson Foxworth celebrates his return to New Orleans by giving a dinner in the 1840 room at Antoines restaurant, ostensibly planned to present his niece for the Carnival festivities and to renew his romance with Amelie Lalande. Laland's daughter Odile, accidently spills a red wine down her white dress, a seemingly light incident. However, it is recalled thirty hours later when she is found dead with a strange pistol and an ambiguous note on the floor beside her. Though looking like suicide the plot revolves out of proving otherwise. Infused with much history, customs, and mores of New Orleans of the 1940's. With a new introduction by Patricia Brady setting the history, context of the novel, and with biographical notes on Keyes.

Dinner at Antoines (Louisiana Heritage)

Literature & Fiction

Keyes, Frances Parkinson

Genre Fiction

Second Line Press

The first of Keyes' novels set in Louisiana was Crescent Carnival, which tells the story of three generations of two intertwined families. The Breckenridges are Protestants, while the Fontaines are Catholic Louisiana Creoles. The plot hinges on the way that pride and misfortune conspire with cultural and political differences to keep prospective lovers from marrying. The cycle of failure only ends when two people have the courage to defy the odds and accept their love for each other. Carnival celebrations and Mardi Gras parades form the backdrop of many scenes. Captures the social mores, Carnival season, and the French Quarter of 1940's New Orleans.

Crescent Carnival (Louisiana Heritage)

United States

The sweeping and mighty chronicle of a fabulous family- the hot headed, hot-blooded d'Alverys, and the skeleton ridden house where they were born. On Belle Heloise plantation, with all its old world background; its beer and shrimp parties on the levee, its wild cat hunts in the forest and extravagant weekends in New Orleans. Two generations of patrician Creoles live out their exciting loves and destinies. A saga of conflict and courage, of hope and heart-break, of passion, ambition and desire .

The River Road: Louisiana Heritage Series

The Jew of Seville (Louisiana Heritage)

Sejour, Victor

Dramas & Plays

Penned by Victor Sejour (1817-1874), a francophone Creole native of Louisiana of African descent, The Fortune-Teller (ital) was first performed in French in 1859, just one year after six-year-old Edgardo Mortara was removed from his Jewish home by the Bologna inquisitor after being baptized by a maid. The inquisitor, supported by Pope Pius IX, vowed not to return the boy until his parents converted to Catholicism. In Victor Sejour's touching rendering of the Mortara case, the infant girl Noemi (accent over e) is taken from her Jewish family after being baptized by a wet nurse. Seventeen years later, Noemi's widowed and wealthy mother Gemea (accent over 2nd e) masquerades as a poor fortune-teller in search of Noemi. Featuring a stirring translation by Shapiro and a thoroughly engaging introduction by Weiss, this provocative and important historical drama, written by a Creole "free person" of color, highlights the discrimination not only of Sejour's time, but of ours as well. This is a new and revised edition of a book originally published by the university of Illinois.Also available: Sejour's The Jew of Seville, translated by Norman R. Shapiro with an introduction by M. Lynn Weiss

The Fortune Teller (Louisiana Heritage)

American literature is not only more than Hawthorne and Poe; it is more than English. Long before the Harlem Renaissance, African American poets and their white colleagues were writing in Louisiana, in French, with a quality inspired and polished by a sense of poetic community. These were the Creole poets of the 1800s, creators of a body of work that is at last available in an English translation by renowned translator Norman R. Shapiro. Creole poets have always eluded easy categorization, infusing European poetic forms with Louisiana themes and Native American and African influences to produce an impressive variety of often highly accomplished and always strikingly engaging verse. The first major collection of its kind, Creole Echoes contains over a hundred of these poems by more than thirty different poets. The poems gathered here exhibit the Creole poets' wide range of theme, tone, and sensibility. Somber elegies, whimsical verse, animal fables, love sonnets, odes to nature, curses, polemics, and lauds all find voices here

Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Louisiana Heritage)

Poetry

Jules Choppin, in his time, was a well known New Orleans poet who was published widely in local papers and the important Comptes rendus de l’Athénée Louisianais. Writing in both French and Creole, this bilingual edition is especially notable for the clever, good-humored fables in sprightly Louisiana Creole which this book centers on. Ably translated by renowned French and Creole translator Norman R. Shapiro, whose complete translations of La Fontaine are considered among the best.

Jules Choppin (1830-1914): Poems in Creole and French (Louisiana Heritage)

Choppin, Jules

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was born in 1875 as Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, LA. She resided in New Orleans through her teachers training program at Straight University and began teaching in New Orleans. Her first book, Violets and Other Tales, was published in 1897. She moved to Brooklyn in 1897 and ended up meeting and then marrying the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898. They were divorced in 1902 and she then moved to Wilmington, Delaware. In 1916 she married Robert J. Nelson, a civil rights activist, journalist, and politician. In the early 1920's they both edited and published the Wilmington Advocate, a progressive Black newspaper. From the 1920's through the 1930's she was prominent as a political and social activist and in demand as a public speaker. She died in 1935 at the age of 60. These 14 short stories beautifully capture the time and place of the New Orleans of Dunbar-Nelson's youth and young adulthood . Afterword by Tim Murray, University of Delaware, where Alice Dunbar-Nelson's papers are archived.

The Goodness of Saint Roch (Louisiana Heritage)

Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Ruth Moore

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