Literary Louisiana: Tales of hope, history and memory

Marguerite Sheffer | The Man in the Banana Trees

Sheffer’s debut short story collection, “The Man in the Banana Trees,” starts with the kind of short story you’ve read before, about a teacher trying to reach a student but just not knowing how. The story is beautifully written, and grips you, but your familiarity with it leads you in to a false sense of hope that is shattered in the story’s stunning and beautiful conclusion. Sheffer’s mastery of prose and emotion constantly turn story arcs that seem familiar to the reader and reinvent them in ways that are emotionally devastating and new. Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, Sheffer’s collection of short stories promises to grip the reader in a way that won’t let them put the book down. $18, 160 pages

One Book One New Orleans Partnership with the University of New Orleans

One Book One New Orleans (OBONO) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting literacy and building community within the city. The organization picks a New Orleans-centric book each year to hand out to communities in need (from schools to incarcerated people), and host events and readings. OBONO is now partnering with the University of New Orleans (UNO), one of the most heralded writing programs in Louisiana,  to make the OBONO selections the “common reader” across departments at UNO. This year, with Mona Lisa Saloy’s “Black Creole Chronicles,” UNO will start to incorporate the OBONO selections into their curriculum. The University of New Orleans will also host a bevy of events at the university campus as well.

Andy Young | Museum of the Soon to Depart

Andy Young’s poetry collection, “Museum of the Soon to Depart,” is part biographic, part surreal and all poetic. The first section of Young’s book takes the reader from New Orleans to Ecuador to a bomb shelter in Spain, drawing inspiration from her own life and from photographs and newspaper articles. She writes as a mother and as someone who has lost lots of life. Young writes in free verse and forms, including villanelles and duplexes, the latter of which was made popular by New Orleans Poet Jericho Brown, such as in the poem, “Pandemic Funeral,” which includes the lines, “In a Facebook funeral / siblings sit a pew apart. / All my siblings pulled apart. / My father’s masked and small.”  This was published as a part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series. Young is a teacher at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts high school. $20, 88 pages

Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins | Seasons at Lakeside Dairy: Family Stories from a Black-Owned Dairy, Louisiana to California and Beyond

Follow author Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins’ journey as she writes a book that is part memoir, part historical document about the dairy her family used to run. The dairy was opened in 1907 by her grandfather in Shreveport, Louisiana. The book follows their migration west to California, as many Black Louisianans had to do at the time. It includes historical context, family recipes and unique insights in the family, Southern history and history of the United States of America. $28, 240 pages