a work of collaborative fiction by Ray Gremillion
Chapter One is FREE
The Katrina Decameron is a piece of collaborative, fiction written by eight Louisiana writers in 2006. The recordings have been collected over the past four years and now the project is completed and available in .mp3 format for iDevices and media players of all kinds.
The Katrina Decameron presents (as opposed to represents) the fictional side of the storm. Each writer was a person stranded in a house in the French Quarter during Hurricane Katrina. To pass the time they had to tell stories and get to know each other (the flirtatiousness of The Decameron pales in comparison to the carnal events that ensue). The novel begins when the electricity goes out. Characters include: a pregnant soccer mom, a young black line cook, a northern businessman, a local (Mid-City) loose woman, a Coon Ass (what Cajun's proudly call each other), off-shore man wanderer, and two love scorned transplants struggling to start a new life in New Orleans. Though not personified, you’ll find the storm itself to be the major character of the novel. It is important that such an event also be cast in the realm of imagination--sometimes with more underlying truth than personal accounts.
The book is structured chronologically by each day of technological disaster after the storm, with individual chapter introductions written and read by Andrei Codrescu—the voice that guides the chaos.
The Katrina Decameron is a piece of collaborative, fiction written by eight Louisiana writers in 2006. The recordings have been collected over the past four years and now the project is completed and available in .mp3 format for iDevices and media players of all kinds.
The Katrina Decameron presents (as opposed to represents) the fictional side of the storm. Each writer was a person stranded in a house in the French Quarter during Hurricane Katrina. To pass the time they had to tell stories and get to know each other (the flirtatiousness of The Decameron pales in comparison to the carnal events that ensue). The novel begins when the electricity goes out. Characters include: a pregnant soccer mom, a young black line cook, a northern businessman, a local (Mid-City) loose woman, a Coon Ass (what Cajun's proudly call each other), off-shore man wanderer, and two love scorned transplants struggling to start a new life in New Orleans. Though not personified, you’ll find the storm itself to be the major character of the novel. It is important that such an event also be cast in the realm of imagination--sometimes with more underlying truth than personal accounts.
The book is structured chronologically by each day of technological disaster after the storm, with individual chapter introductions written and read by Andrei Codrescu—the voice that guides the chaos.