City

New Orleans

New Orleans is the only American city that feels like it belongs to a different country — which, historically, it did. French, Spanish, Creole, Caribbean — the layers are audible in the music, visible in the architecture, and tasteable in the gumbo. Tennessee Williams arrived and found the French Quarter already performing itself: the streetcars, the jazz bleeding from doorways, the way humidity turns everything soft and slightly dangerous. He set Blanche DuBois here because only New Orleans could hold that much desire and that much ruin in the same room. Anne Rice filled the same streets with vampires and nobody blinked — the city was already Gothic. Burke gave it a detective who drinks too much and writes prose too well. New Orleans does not produce literature the way other cities do. It sweats it out, like everything else, slowly and in the heat.

Last updated 4 days ago