Camp, Friedmann, Wascom to discuss latest novels

Three local authors – Bryan Camp, Patty Friedmann and Kent Wascom – discuss their latest books at 7 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 27, at the East Bank Regional Library, 4747 W. Napoleon, Metairie. This event is co-sponsored by the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, an annual five-day literary festival that occurs in the city of New Orleans each spring. The festival is dedicated to the Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Tennessee Williams. Every year, it features several events related to the long career of Williams, as well as writing workshops, panel discussions, literary readings, stage performances, a book fair, music, writing contests, and other events.

Bryan Camp, The City of Lost Fortunes

The post–Katrina New Orleans of The City of Lost Fortunes is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane’s destruction, a place that is hoping to survive the rebuilding of its present long enough to ensure that it has a future. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the consequences of the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known—a father who just happens to be more than human.

Jude has been lying low since the storm, which caused so many things to be lost that it played havoc with his magic, and he is hiding from his own power, his divine former employer, and a debt owed to the Fortune god of New Orleans. But his six-year retirement ends abruptly when the Fortune god is murdered and Jude is drawn back into the world he tried so desperately to leave behind.

Bryan Camp is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop and the University of New Orleans’s Master of Fine Arts program. He started his first novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, in the back seat of his parents’ car as they evacuated the Crescent City during Hurricane Katrina.

Patty Friedmann, Where Do They All Come From?

Over the course of her novel-writing career, New Orleans writer Patty Friedmann also has written short stories that resonate with her darkly comic voice. This collection offers the best—some old, some new, some before Katrina, a few written after she unscrambled her mind from not evacuating for the storm. All deal, in one way or another, with the weighty loneliness of urban living.

She shares what might be her most memorable character, Jerusha Bailey, a mean old white woman who loses her husband’s ashes in a McDonald’s parking lot, and Darby, the smart girl who lives in a New Orleans gingerbread house but is tormented by her dumb brick-house-dwelling private school classmates. 

Patty Friedmann is a New Orleans novelist and short story writer whose hallmark is dark humor. Her novels include Eleanor Rushing, Secondhand Smoke, and Too Jewish, and she has been selected for Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers, Borders Original Voices, and BookSense 76 among other honors and awards.

Kent Wascom, The New Inheritors

In 1914, with the world on the brink of war, Isaac, a nature-loving artist whose past is mysterious to all, including himself, meets Kemper, a defiant heiress caught in the rivalry between her brothers. Kemper’s older brother Angel is hiding a terrible secret about his sexuality, and her younger brother Red possesses a capacity for violence that frightens even the members of his own brutal family. Together Isaac and Kemper build a refuge on their beloved, wild, Gulf Coast. But their paradise is short-lived; as the coast is rocked by the storms of summer, the country is gripped by the furor preceding World War I, and the Woolsack family’s rivalries come to a bloody head.

Kent Wascom’s first novel, The Blood of Heaven, was named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and NPR. It was shortlisted for the David J. Langum Sr. Prize for Historical Fiction and longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Award for First Fiction. Wascom was awarded the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for Fiction.

For more information regarding this presentation, contact Chris Smith, Manager of Adult Programming for the library, at 504-889-8143 or wcsmith@jefferson.lib.la.us.

Louisiana Book News is written by award-winning author Chere Dastugue Coen, who writes Louisiana romances and mysteries under the pen name of Cherie Claire. Her first book in each series is FREE to download as an ebook, including "Emilie," book one of The Cajun Series, "Ticket to Paradise," book one of The Cajun Embassy series and "A Ghost of a Chance," the first Viola Valentine mystery.