NEW ORLEANS: What Can't Be Lost

Start: 12/18/2010 2:00 pm

Join us for a signing with Lee Barclay and contributors to NEW ORLEANS: What Can't Be Lost.

The eighty-eight stories and traditions in New Orleans: What Can't Be Lost are the piano keys in a love song to the city. Alongside Christopher Porché West's alluring black-and-white photographs, New Orleans' culture bearers pay tribute to the city they call home. From Storyville to the Super Bowl, from cover to cover are found Pulitzer Prize-winning writers--four of them gathered on these pages; Creole chefs; float and costume designers; a break-acrobat flipping forward over tourists lying on the pavement like matchsticks across from Jackson Square; Black Mardi Gras Indians; parade captains; musicians; protectors of the city's historic landmarks; writers of its poems and articles and novels and plays; and those who pass down traditions in the performance of New Orleans culture.

Proud to call New Orleans home, LEE BARCLAY lives in Faubourg St. John, down a bend of the bayou from 600-year-old oaks, pelicans, ibises, and blue herons. She is devoted to the preservation of New Orleans through community education and collaboration and the performance of New Orleans culture--in kitchens and down backstreets; through trumpets and voices; on page, stage, and sidewalk; and when any time, for any reason, a parade rolls by.

CHRISTOPHER PORCHÉ WEST is a photographer and artist who has been documenting the people and culture of New Orleans for over thirty years. A native Californian with Franco-European roots in Louisiana, Porché West first came to New Orleans in the late 1970s and relocated permanently to the Crescent City in 1981. He currently lives and works in one of New Orleans' oldest neighborhoods, Bywater, founded in 1809, where he continues to document and preserve the culture and life of New Orleans and its people.

Click here to listen to WWNO Fred Kasten's "THE SOUND OF BOOKS" interview about NEW ORLEANS: What Can't Be Lost.