Ocean State Libraries

"The shocking death of a young woman leads Detective Dave Robicheaux into the dark corners of Hollywood, the mafia, and the backwoods of Louisiana in this gripping mystery from "modern master" (Publishers Weekly) James Lee Burke. Detective Dave Robicheaux's world isn't filled with too many happy stories, but Desmond Cormier's rags-to-riches tale is certainly one of them. Robicheaux first met Cormier on the streets of New Orleans, when the young, undersized...

From one of the country's most acclaimed and popular novelists comes a selection of a dozen short stories set in James Lee Burke's most beloved milieu, the Deep South. James Lee Burke has become a dedicated voice for the people of Louisiana, especially post-Katrina. This collection demonstrates the depth of his feeling for the state that has always been such a study in contrasts: rural and urban, old and new, wild and civilized. In this moving collection...

Best known for her novel The awakening, Kate Chopin (1851-1904) established her literary reputation with short stories about life in rural Louisiana during the late nineteenth century. After her 1870 marriage to Oscar Chopin, a Creole cotton trader and commission merchant, she lived in and around New Orleans for more than a decade until her husband's death in 1882. During these years, Chopin became acquainted with Creoles, Cajuns, and newly freed...

"April, 1840. Benjamin January knows no black person in their right mind would willingly go to the Republic of Texas but when his former pupil Selina Bellinger is kidnapped and enslaved, he has no choice. Once there he is saved from being hanged by Valentina Taggart, wife of the wealthy landowner of Rancho Perdition. After Valentina is accused of the murder of her husband, she in turn calls on Benjamin for help. To do so, he must abandon the safe...

In the decade prior to the publication of her landmark novel, The Awakening (1899), Kate Chopin wrote about ninety short stores. She gathered twenty-three of them in a collection entitled Babou Folk in 1894, and followed that three years later with a collection of twenty-one more in A Night in Acadie. Together, these nuanced portraits of nineteenth-century inhabitants of New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish exquisitely from a sort of Southern novel...

Mules and Men is a treasury of black America's folklore as collected by a famous storyteller and anthropologist who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings and tall tales that have formed an oral history of the South since the time of slavery. Returning to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, to gather material, Zora Neale Hurston recalls "a hilarious night with a pinch of everything social mixed with the storytelling." Set intimately within...