Light of New Orleans Publishing was founded the first year of this old millennium in order to create an anthology of the best short stories on the heart of New Orleans. Over two years French Quarter Fiction: The Newest Stories of America’s Oldest Bohemia blossomed into 400 pages containing everything from unpublished Tennessee Williams to a story by some Australian guy who’s outback town was replaced with a telephone box last year. After five printings, winning regional book of the year, signings across the country, and hitting Amazon’s top 25, the Booksense 76, and regional bestseller lists, our next book was Judy Conner’s Southern Fried Divorce, which immediately upon release landed on the Top 10 Bestselling Humor Books. In Januay 2005 we sold the title to Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin. Barry Gifford's Back in America was released in December of 2004. Other books lie on the horizon, including one exploring the question of why Mississippi has produced far and away more literary authors than any other state, but Katrina has focused our efforts elsewhere for the time being, including the KARES relief fund.

Joshua Clark, president and founder of the independent publishing company, contributes travel features, essays, fiction and photographs to dozens of publications, from the Los Angeles Times to the Miami Herald, magazines such as New Laurel Review, Louisiana Literature, Time Out: New York, and Lonely Planet anthologies. Clark has covered New Orleans for Salon.com and NPR, was associate editor for Scat Magazine, and recently edited Louisiana: In Words, an anthology of 120 Louisiana writers depicting a day in the life of our state. His memoir on surviving Katrina and living in its disaster zone, Heart Like Water, will be released in July 07 by Simon & Schuster.

Light of New Orleans receives its mail on Royal Street—the same postal emporium Tennessee Williams once used—and our office is not far from there, just off Jackson Square. We pass our days here on the third story of one of the country’s oldest buildings, going cross-eyed in front of computer monitors, whizzing back and forth through rooms in our wheeled chairs, far above the hubbub below. Jazz gently fills the sunlight that creeps through the grail on our low windows, at night metamorphisizing into the drunken euphoria that New Orleans brings to sorority girls and conventioneers and trainhoppers alike, their laughter and shouts filling the lamplit darkness outside which often finds us still plugging away, often long after our 24 hour bars have expired these newcomers, until again it is quiet in waiting for a new day, and it is time to go home.

When I came to the office early the other morning, I inadvertently woke up two men sleeping underneath pizza boxes below the potted tree on the sidewalk in front of our entryway. When I went out hours later, I opened the door downstairs to find myself in the middle of a movie set. There was John Cusack, sitting below that same potted tree, sipping bottled water, chatting with Jennifer Beals about something or other while I crept through the scattered film debris with my rusted ’56 Schwinn bicycle in order to begin 3 hours of errands which consisted of everything from FedEx-ing proofs to Canada to going to Kinkos to have galleys printed to picking up canned beans for our dinner and chicken feed for our newly acquired mascot—a baby duck named Zeus that we keep in a pen next to the desk in our smallest office. When I returned it was dark and John Cusack was gone, replaced by Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. Hours later, when I left for the night, they in turn were replaced by those two lesser known characters under their pizza boxes again.

It’s often consoling to know there is still a world right outside our doors when we have been cooped up in the office for days at a time, surrounded by stacks of papers and negatives and disks and computer parts of every size and wires of every length that never ever seem quite long enough. Somehow the vast overflow of life that persists on the sidewalks below us soothes our detachment from anything but our projects, the first of which was to celebrate those very sidewalks.

Thanks for reading, and please feel free to drop us a line. Many cheers.

—Joshua Clark

Back to French Quarter Fiction

Quotes about why we live where we live:

"The wealth of the world is here unworked gold in the ore. The paradise of the South is here, deserted and half in ruins. I never beheld anything so beautiful and so sad."
—Lafcadio Hearn, Life and Letters, 1877.

"…the French Quarter houses every vice that man has ever conceived in his wildest aberrations, including, I would imagine, several modern variants made possible through the wonders of science. The Quarter is not unlike... Soho and certain sections of North Africa. However, the residents of the French Quarter, blessed with American "Stick-to-it-tiveness" and "Know-how," are probably straining themselves at this moment to equal and surpass in variety and imagination the diversions enjoyed by the residents of those other world areas of human degradation."
—John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces, 1980.

"I came down here about a month ago and am living in the old French Creole Quarter, the most civilized place I've found in America, and have been writing like a man gone mad ever since I got off the train."
—Sherwood Anderson, Letters, 1922, published 1953.

“the French Quarter…was a place to hide. I could piss away my life, unmolested… there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone… being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad if you can be that way undisturbed. New Orleans gave me that."
—Charles Bukowski, Young in New Orleans, copywright1982

"…New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter."
—Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

"I know all about you degenerates in the Quarter. I ain't let rooms ten years in the Quarter for nothin'."
— Tennessee Williams, "The Angel in the Alcove"

"I liked it from the first: I lingered long in that morning walk, liking it more and more, in spite of its shabbiness, but utterly unable to say then or ever since wherein its charm lies. I suppose we are all wrongly made up and have a fallen nature; else why is it that while the most thrifty and neat and orderly city only wins our approval, and perhaps gratifies us intellectually, such a thriftless, battered and stained, and lazy old place at the French quarter of New Orleans takes our hearts?"
—Charles Dudley Warner, "New Orleans" in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, January 1887.

"This town is the first that one of the world's great rivers has seen rise upon its banks... this wild and desrt [sic] place that canes and trees still cover almost entirely, will be one day, and perhaps that day is not far off, an opulent city and the metropolis of a great and rich colony."
—Pierre-François Xavier de Charlevoix, A Voyage to North-America, 1722, published 1766.

"One morning-it was December, I think, a cold Sunday with a sad gray sun-I went up through the Quarter to the old market where, at that time of year, there are exquisite winter fruits, sweet satsumas, twenty cents a dozen, and winter flowers, Christmas poinsettia and snow japonica. New Orleans streets have long, lonesome perspectives; in empty hours their atmosphere is like a Chirico, and things innocent, ordinarily (a face behind the slanted light of shutters, nuns moving in the distance, a fat dark arm lolling lopsidedly out some window, a lonely black boy squatting in an alley, blowing soap bubbles and watching sadly as they rise to burst), acquire qualities of violence."
—Truman Capote, Local Color, 1946.

"Outside the window New Orleans, the vieux carré, brooded in a faintly tarnished languor like an aging yet still beautiful courtesan in a smokefilled room, avid yet weary too of ardent ways."
—William Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 1927.

"I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle."
—Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, 1961.

"Much distortion of opinion has existed... respecting public morals and manners in New Orleans. Divested of pre-conceived ideas on the subject, an observing man will find little to condemn in New Orleans, more than in other commercial cities; and will find that noble distinction of all active communities, acuteness of conception, urbanity of manners, and polished exterior. There are few places where human life can be enjoyed with more pleasure, or employed to more pecuniary profit."
—William Darby, A Geographical Description of the State of Louisiana, 1816.

"Here one finds the narrow streets with overhanging balconies, the beautiful wrought-iron and cast-iron railings, the great barred doors and tropical courtyards. Many of these fine houses are more than a century and a quarter old, and they stand today as monuments to their forgotten architects. For it must be remembered that New Orleans was a Latin city already a century old before it became a part of the United States; and it was as unlike the American cities along the Atlantic seaboard as though Louisiana were on another continent.
—Federal Writers' Project, New Orleans City Guide, 1938.

"During the greater part of the first half-century in which Louisiana was part of the United States... the more legitimate gayety of the town was concentrated in the Vieux Carré, which, though Spanish in its physical aspects, was still predominantly French in spirit and custom. In that area were located the pits for cock-fighting; the elegantly appointed gambling-houses; the best of the cafés and coffee-houses; the fashionable cabarets and bordellos, which were operated with such circumspection that almost no record of their existence remains; the eating-places which were already developing the cuisine that was destined to spread the fame of New Orleans throughout the world; the ballrooms; and most of the theatres..."
—Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter, 1936.

"The banquettes of Royal Street were crowded with the masked and the unmasked, almost everyone moving slowly uptown toward Canal Street. The bars on the corners were already filled. Decorated automobiles rolled past, and now and then more trucks. There was a truck filled with hillbillies, with a little outhouse at the center of it, entitled 'Dog Patch,' and another filled with boys and girls in striped suits called 'The Prisoners of Love.' Two voluptuous blondes in pale lavender taffety gowns of the Gay Nineties, wearing no masks, but with their faces heavily painted, came swishing down the banquette, each carrying a bottle of bourbon, from which they took drinks from time to time, and conversing in deep bass voices. They were men."
—Robert Tallant, Mardi Gras, 1947.

"The houses’ chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds. This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be found elsewhere in America."
—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883.

“My advice to you is to stay for a while in the old section of the city, sit for a time in Jackson Square and let the old world charm you. Give the atmosphere a chance to lull you. Take your time and wander slowly; look twice at the old houses, they are worth it. Talk to the beggars in the street; talk to any one you chance to meet. The natives of the Quarter are pleasant people and they will gladly tell you anything they happen to know."
—Lyle Saxon, Fabulous New Orleans, 1928.

Quotes about why we live what we live:

“Writing is easy, you just sit down at a typewriter, open up a vein, and bleed it out drop by drop.”--Red Smith

"Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words." --Mark Twain

"Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen, and not a shadow of an idea of what you're going to say." --Francoise Sagan

"Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent." --Ernest Hemingway

"I know everything. One has to, to write decently." --Henry James

"A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. "--John Steinbeck

“The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” --John Steinbeck

"We are basically storytellers, descendants of the old men who sat around the fire and told us legends, fairytales, exploits, or maybe just how funny Og looked when he fell into the tar pit." --Sol Saks in Funny Business

Watt-Evans' Law:
There is no idea so stupid or absurd that a sufficiently-talented writer can't base a decent story on it. --Lawrence Watt-Evans

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." --Groucho Marx

"My idea is to have the hours altered so that public houses will be permitted to open only between two and five in the morning. This means that if you are a drinking man you'll have to be in earnest about it." --Flann O'Brien

"Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep." --Fran Lebowitz

"Times are bad. Children do not listen to their parents, and everyone is writing a book." --Junius

"I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose--even bad prose--that is eternal." --Anthony Burgess, Playboy Interview, September 1974

"If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself." —Annie Dillard

"Homer! There's a man here who thinks he can help you!"
"Batman?"
"No, he's a scientist!"
"Batman's a scientist."
"It's not Batman!"
—The Simpsons

"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." —Voltaire

"Somebody's boring me... I think it's me." —Dylan Thomas

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." —Albert Einstein

"All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it." --Marcel Proust, Guermantes Way

“But I suppose it’s all sort of messy: living and seething corruption glossed over for a while by smoothly colored flesh; all foul until the clean and naked bone.”
- William Faulkner (Horace Benbow in Flags in the Dust)

Light of New Orleans Publishing, LLC
828 Royal Street #307, New Orleans, Louisiana 70116
telephone: 504.523.4322 facsimile: 504.522.0688

Copyright ©2003 Light of New Orleans Publishing, LLC