Uproot a city of artists and you will hear their cries, and New Orleans was nothing if not a gathering place for creatives. The musicians have been heard on such gut-scraping releases as Our New Orleans (Nonesuch). Now the city’s writers have begun to release their laments, notably novelist and critic Tom Piazza arguing from the heart Why New Orleans Matters and NPR commentator and poet Andrei Codrescu bookending a collection of essays and radio pieces, New Orleans, Mon Amour, with reflections on the Katrina disaster.

Both books are powerful, rich with anger, longing, and barely expressible loss. But whereas Codrescu, who first came to the city in 1982, primarily communicates through the indirect languor of a poet (or a long-time New Orleanian), Piazza, who moved to there in 1994, scores a direct hit. His book is an argument, laid out to build a case. That he is preaching to the converted — who else will read this book? — matters little. Attention must be paid. And what a case Piazza makes: first woo

When Stephen King received a lifetime-achievement award from the National Book Awards in 2003, literary critic Harold Bloom threw a fit. "He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls," Bloom ranted. "That they could believe that there is any literary value or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testament to their own idiocy." It’s a safe bet Bloom didn’t run to his local bookstore and pick up King’s latest, The Colorado Kid. Too bad. A thoughtful tribute to the pulp classics of the 1940s and 50s, it is just the latest installment in an increasingly diverse and interesting body of work, including foreshadowings of high-school shootings and reality TV, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. And more recently, King has made forays into non-fiction with essays like "Head Down," about coaching his son’s Little League baseball team, and an unassuming memoir, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

The Colorado Kid is h

Jed Perl’s New Art City is as knotty as it is ambitious. Stack your Hegel, Kant, Marx, and any and all NYC gallery guides on the nightstand: everything’s about to get real heavy.

The art critic for the New Republic, Perl has a simple premise: Manhattan in the ’30s to the ’50s was one of culture’s great artistic melting pots, a time and, more important, a place in which burgeoning styles of architecture, drama, and poetry created a febrile environment for the rise of what, along with jazz, may be America’s great indigenous art, the beast that is Abstract Expressionism. And what a many-headed monster this creature is: Action Painting, Joseph Cornell boxes, inter-faction rivalries, critical backlashes, pundits and poseurs, and work whose very abstractness can still provoke outrage.

Perl writes in the tradition of æsthetic exposition once dominated by the likes of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg — big-time players in this story — and you get the feeling that even he does

Since September 11, publishers have been rushing to supply Americans with non-fiction books about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and anything relating to the upheavals in the Middle East. They’ve been much slower about supplying us with imaginative tales from these regions, but the trickle has begun. The winter of 2006 features several new imports that are safer than a trip to Ramallah and almost as intense.

FICTION

The most notable of these works is The Gate of the Sun (Archipelago, February 1), a novel by Elias Khoury that’s set during the events of 1948, when Palestinians were displaced during the creation of Israel. As the book begins, two Palestinian men remain behind, keeping vigil at the bedside of a leader of the resistance movement. One of them begins a story about what’s just happened, and it gradually expands into a Sheherazade-like yarn of astonishing beauty.

Another superb novel to arrive on these shores from the Arab world is Tahar Ben Jel

Here’s a selection of non-fiction books that Phoenix reviewers liked this year, in alphabetical order by author.

1 JAMES AGEE | FILM WRITING AND SELECTED JOURNALISM AND LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, AND SHORTER FICTION | LIBRARY OF AMERICA | Granted, this two-volume set mixes fiction and non-fiction, but it tips the scales slightly toward non-fiction with Agee’s film criticism and the book-length study of Alabama tenant farmers at the height of the depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (a collaboration with photographer Walker Evans). And we had to put him someplace. Seeing Agee whole for the first time, the Library of America set could finally elevate this eclectic master to the status of great American writer.

2 JEFF CHANG | Books

Speeding through life

The best fiction and poetry of 2005

Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best fiction and poetry books reviewed by the Phoenix in 2005. 1 THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TED BERRIGAN | EDITED BY ALICE NOTLEY WITH ANSELM BERRIGAN AND EDMUND BERRIGAN | UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS | Twenty-two years after Ted Berrigan’s sudden death, at age 48, his 758-page Collected Poems will consolidate and expand his legend. Poetry that was brash, funny, risk-taking, and fully alive when written remains bold and fresh. In life, he had legendary status on New York’s Lower East Side and wherever he taught. Loud, streetwise, stoked on speed, a man on whom little was lost, the quick-tongued Berrigan delivered his full freight whenever you encountered him. Readers new to his work will feel the man in this book. 2 CHARLES BURNS | Books Gangsta to gangster The hip-hop life in New Orleans and Queens Being a white rockist bastard and an Englishman to boot, I would suggest that I am the ideal reviewer, at least in Boston, for Nik Cohn’s Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap. I even lived in New Orleans for a while, standing terrified at the top of ladders, pretending to paint houses. Come to think of it, my career as a New Orleans housepainter weirdly parallels Cohn’s career as a New Orleans rap impresario: the initial intoxicating incompetence, the wild freedom of fucking up, the subtle stirrings of aptitude, the not-getting-paid, the defeat . . . Anyway, Cohn, not actually an Englishman but a self-described "Anglo-Irish Russian German South African Jew," has written a fine book about being out of your depth. The story goes like this. Pushing 60, flogged by hepatitis C and in a crisis of whiteness following a nasty moment in New Orleans’s Iberville Project ("The brackish smell of bodies was fierce, and I stumbled back against a wall as the youths moved in"), the creaky ]]> BY JAMES PARKER December 16 - 22, 2005 /books/other_stories/documents/05145787.asp Books Car talk Rafi Zabor’s I, Wabenzi Thirty pages into Rafi Zabor’s sorrow-drenched I, Wabenzi, he remembers the moment when he knew his parents would die. "I woke to the unexpected sound of water," he writes. He runs down the hall to discover his parents stranded in a bathroom filling like a torpedoed submarine. "It rilled up over the bathroom doorsill — pressure behind it giving the water a bit of loft — and from around the sides of the door to an elevation of say three feet." A mere flushing of the toilet had torn a pipe and flooded the Zabors’ Brooklyn apartment. Just a few days earlier, Zabor had performed the Heimlich maneuver on his father and dislocated the man’s ribs. Everything was falling apart, and Zabor was trying not to prolong his parents’ pain as they seethed and sighed toward their grave, one sip of milk and hot water at a time. Finally, it was over. In 1986, age 40, Zabor was parentless and free. Almost. This meandering and word-mad book busts from this loss like a life raft on a torrent of memories. In th ]]> BY JOHN FREEMAN December 9 - 15, 2005 /books/other_stories/documents/05133048.asp Books Here and away Photographer Bill Curtsinger finds the exotic at home Salt marshes first brought photographer Bill Curtsinger to Maine. It was the early 1970s, and he was on his second assignment for National Geographic magazine — a story on the marshes from Georgia to Maine that no one else would take. He'd wanted to come here for as long as he could remember. That was 1971. Curtsinger has been here since. Curtsinger, an adventurer in the classical sense of the word, is compelled to go where very few (if any) have gone; as he explains it, he's "always been drawn to remote regions and severe landscapes." Curtsinger's new book, Extreme Nature: Images from the World's Edge, is a retrospective of his 35-year career. He's shot a good deal of images while diving below cold waters or on land void of human beings. Antarctica, for example, is one of his favorite spots. And Curtsinger's never been intimidated by the long winters and harsh waters of the Gulf of Maine. He calls the Gulf his "home water" and says it's one of the best places on ear ]]> BY BEATRICE MAROVICH December 2 - 8, 2005 /books/other_stories/documents/05122942.asp Books Queer scare Harvard’s homophobic secret court It would be difficult to imagine a more intriguing topic for a book: in 1920, Harvard’s esteemed president, A. Lawrence Lowell, put into action an inquisitorial secret court to ferret out, expel, castigate, and humiliate homosexual students. The result of this judicial burlesque was a score of ruined lives and several suicides. It would also be difficult to imagine a worse book on this topic than William Wright’s Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920s Purge of Campus Homosexuals. Given the clumsiness of Wright’s organization, the laxness of his writing, the lurid excess of his rhetoric, and the paucity of his historical analysis, it’s amazing that Harvard’s Secret Court has any narrative drive at all. But this story is so compelling that the book is a page turner. Wright relies on the cinematic techniques of cross-cutting and flashback. Harvard’s Secret Court begins in 1945 with a nameless, mentally disturbed 56-year-old man brooding on his past as he’s incarcerated in Taunton ]]> BY MICHAEL BRONSKI December 2 - 8, 2005