Room 220s

Susan Bernofsky hails from Louisiana and is an alumna of the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. Now living in New York, she is a German language translator, a teacher at the Colombia University School of the Arts, and …

Susan Larson has established herself as the most visible individual guide to literary New Orleans. A new edition of her compendium, The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans, has just been released, offering updates to its takes on New Orleans …

{From Press Street’s Room 220}

All images by Gabriele Stabile from Refugee Hotel

Refugees granted asylum in the United States arrive through only a handful of cities. They often spend the first night in their new country at a …

{From Press Street’s Room 220}

Writer Daniel Wolff came to New Orleans five months after Hurricane Katrina with filmmaker Jonathan Demme, not knowing what they’d find. They were told the story was over, that all the “good shots” had …

{From Press Street’s Room 220}

Sheila Heti’s third book, How Should a Person Be? is about Sheila. The character is a Toronto-based writer grappling with a play she can’t seem to finish, stuck in a marriage that stifles her. …

{From Press Street’s Room 220}

Like any historical novel—even one set in recent history—Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is a convergence of the past and the present, the time before now rendered with the help of research but intrinsically influenced …

{From Press Street’s Room 220}

Athanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit and self-styled “master of a hundred arts,” is credited with inventing the megaphone, a pre-cursor to the computer, and (perhaps) a cat piano. His intense curiosity about the …

{From Press Street’s Room 220}

Someone quipped at last weekend’s Tennessee Williams Festival that Nathaniel Rich’s new novel, Odds Against Tomorrow (FSG, 2013), was the best Katrina book set in New York City. This observation conceals a degree of …