Storytelling with Louisiana-Based Authors

The Maltese Version

Katy Simpson Smith’s “The Maltese Version” starts with the premise of two writers who are partnered, who are “on two paths, pretending they’re on one.” One of Simpson Smith’s superpowers is being able to seamlessly juggle different point of view characters and timelines, like in her novel “The Everlasting.” It doesn’t take long reading her work to fall into the ease of language and the dream world she has conjured, with some beautifully pleasant lines like “slid a plate onto the counter so it jutted off the side, asking to be wrecked,” in the opening paragraph, or even the opening line, “One day they were in love and the next, a manuscript appeared in his study, written in a language she didn’t speak.” Katy Simpson Smith lives in New Orleans. 320 pages, $19

Should the Waters Take Us

Stephanie Soileau’s debut novel, “Should the Waters Take Us,” follows a family from France to Acadia to coastal Louisiana across four decades. When an oil rig explodes in the fictional Pelerin Parish, an entire community is tested as everyone tries to stay together and survive. In a community already reckoning with wealth disparities and people just trying to survive in normal times, the explosion of an oil rig, followed by a hurricane placing the community in its cone, results in a novel that creates nonstop tension. A story about a community, and the desire to save your home, Soileau writes a beautiful novel. Soileau is originally from Lake Charles. 336 pages, $30

Cloudthief

Nathaniel Rich is maybe most known for his nonfiction book on climate change called “Losing Earth.” In his latest novel, “Cloudthief,” Rich tackles data centers (and their massive contribution to climate change), in the guise of a heist/road trip/noirish novel. “Cloudthief” follows Tim, a struggling freelance climate journalist who follows Virginia into committing a data center heist. (The cloud in question being where so many of us store our data.) While the data center in the novel is in Oklahoma, the increase in data centers across the country and Louisiana, including in Richland for Meta, makes this novel hit really close to home. Rich lives in New Orleans and teaches at Tulane. 304 pages, $19

The Hanged Man 

Three Lebanese American sisters live across the Deep South of the United States, when they each have a different vision of the mother that left them behind six years ago. All three sisters see their mother in a flash, like the one sister who sees her during a ghost tour in New Orleans’ French Quarter. This collection of short stories deals with the grief of trying to come to terms with an absence that constantly feels like a wound. “The Hanged Man” is published by Black Lawrence Press. Katherine Conner teaches at Nicholls State University. 150 pages, $17.95