Spreading the Good News of Nancy Lemann

Nancy Lemann is the author of five novels and one work of nonfiction, the glorious and strange Ritz of the Bayou (1987). New Orleans features prominently in her work, as do the rituals of upper-class White Southern society, drinking, and affection for the principled derelict. Her first novel Lives of the Saints, from 1985, has become a cult classic, beloved for its cracked romanticism, its giddy melancholy, its louche New Orleans grandeur. That NYRB Classics has chosen to reissue Lives of the Saints, as well as publish Lemann’s new novel The Oyster Diaries, her first in more than twenty years, is cause for much rejoicing.