1. The Awakening by Kate Chopin - We're taught to read it as the feminist awakening of a woman. I get more out of it reading it as a Yankee discovering the joy of living and learning to let go of Yankee prudishness and insecurity. This is something that still happens and the culture differences do still exist. This book should be required reading before a Yankee moves to any city south of (or on) the I-10 in Louisiana. (Or perhaps it should be saved for the period when the Yankees realize, quite suddenly, that they wouldn't want to live anywhere else because this is the only place you can get Italian Hot Tamales. And besides, their daughter just got engaged to a Longnion and is planning the stereotypical Baptist/Catholic wedding so common to the region.)

2. A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler- another clash of strange cultures book. It's a beautiful book about having everything in the world ripped from you and then learning to live again. A collection of short stories about the Vietnamese who came to Louisianain the 1970's.

3. The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine by John Folse - We don't eat Prudhomme nor do we buy his books in my family: that fat SOB was at the head of the fight AGAINST banning gillnets in Louisiana waters back in the 90's after he'd tried to drive a species to extinction in the 80's. (Blackened redfish, anyone?) John Folse is a good ole' Cajun gentleman whose cooking is far better than Prudhomme. In addition, he understands and honors the two cuisines better than any other chef alive, IMHO. This book is HUGE, the pictures are gourgeous, the recipes divine, and it's everything you ever wanted to know about Cajun and Creole Cuisine.

Still. missing Chopin was outright dumb.

Is this one supposed to be about Louisiana? Or New Orleans? I can imagine a separate entry for each.

any mention of Philip Gould's incredible photography of the whole state and its various peoples?

It's just more the same NOLA-centic ethos so like that famous New Yorker cover which reduced the whole interior to a blank space between the Eart Coast and the West.

'Louisiana - A Land Apart' LSU Press is absolutely essential.

He's even in the Smithsonian for crying out loud.

We miss Enola's Restaurant - the original hole-in-the-wall in Washington as well as the later version off I-49 near the original site of Evangeline Downs racetrack, but I'm damned if I recall ever having a 'diet' meal at either, cher.

My favorite summation of Paul's restaurant in the VC was 'More rules than East Germany and only tourists would put up with it.'

Any discussion of the literature of New Orleans needs to include George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880). In this pair of uncompromising works, which were widely reviled in the South of their day, Cable tackles the issues of slavery and white supremacy head on. Even today – as is sometimes the case with Faulkner – many southern critics and Cable’s fellow New Orleanians have not found it within themselves to fully embrace Cable. His insistence upon the inclusion of the darker, more violent side of the Southern experience unsettles his fiction with difficult knots and contradictions. The story of the enslavement of the African royal prince Bras-Coupé, tucked into the center of The Grandissimes, illustrates, (as Jay Hubbell explains in his monumental The South in American Literature), “The rudiments of the internal division between loving and hating the South that identifies Faulkner’s Quentin Compson as the quintessential Southern imagination” (xix).

Cable’s Grandissimes, a work that late nineteenth century tourists actually used in their tours of New Orleans because of its meticulous fidelity to place, is permeated with an obvious love for his native city. Mining the cultural humus that had accumulated over the city’s long and culturally varied history, Cable crafts a work that both celebrates, yet refuses to turn from the grim reality of its slave-tainted past. As some critics have noted, The Grandissimes represents the first significant attempt in literature by a native Southerner to grapple with this disturbing problem that has affected the region on every fundamental level. Slavery, Cable seems to be saying, is a sin that was produced collectively and must be similarly expiated. Mark Twain (a friend of Cable's) felt that he was the only writer in all the South, despite its post-war embrace of modern commercialism, who thought beyond its attachment to its feudal past – the only writer, in effect, who thought like a modern.

Jean Marie Poquelin, (from the short story “Jean-ah-Poquelin” in Old Creole Days) is a formerly wealthy indigo planter from a New Orleans that, in the wake of the collapse of the slave-based economy, is now gone. (New Orleans has remade itself before). Jean lives in a brooding house at the edge of the city with a mute slave and the mystery of his half-brother, who, it is rumored, Jean has murdered. In an early instance of unchecked urban development, the city has been pressuring Jean to allow them to drain his poisonous marsh in order to put a road past his front gate. The land upon which the house stands, the levee of a draining canal from its plantation past, mirrors Jean’s fierce resistance to modern development: “The waters of this canal did not run; they crawled, and were full of big ravening fish and alligators, that held it against all comers” (180). Here, Cable seems to say, is the last entrenchment of the sins of the South’s slave-holding past. It will not, both Jean and the land demand, be swept under the rug of progress.

Compelling and confrontational works, and I highly recommend both of these New Orleans-related titles.

Who edits these things? Ms. Wells, "Laissez le bon ton roulez" does NOT mean "Let the good times roll"-That would be, "Laissez le bon temps roulez"-Le bon ton, in French, is fashionable society.--Perhaps, considering some of Salon's articles in this series, Ms. Wells was just being fashionably wrong.