Ice Fishing for Alligators

This is not just another anthology of fiction from New Orleans. Only a few of these stories are set in the city, and even in those few you will find no streetcars or beignets, voodoo queens or gumbo. That is to say none of the usual clichés. You might say, though, that New Orleans haunts these stories, that what lurks in these pages is a carnival of original short fiction to delight and disturb, a gallery that runs the gamut from dirty realism to fabulist tales. These stories, wherever they occur, all found their way to New Orleans, rose up through the slush pile and appeared for the first time in the pages of the New Orleans Review. They're steeped in the uptown funk in which they were first read. Each in its own way jolted the editors and readers out of their everyday malaise. These stories, the best short fiction from a literary magazine in its prime, are indeed haunted by New Orleans, the place in which they were first discovered and published. Here they are again, provocative, disturbing, and unexpectedly rising to the surface.