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It is 1891 in New Orleans, and young Typhus Morningstar cycles
under the light of the half-moon to fulfill his calling, rebirthing aborted
fetuses in the fecund waters of the Mississippi River. He cannot know that
nearby, events are unfolding that will change his life forever -- events that
were set in motion by a Vodou curse gone wrong, forty years before he was
born.
In the humble home of Sicilian immigrants, a one-year-old boy
has been possessed by a demon. His father dead, lynched by a mob, his
distraught mother at her wits' end, this baby who yesterday could only crawl
and gurgle is now walking, dancing, and talking -- in a voice impossibly deep.
The doctor has fled, and several men of the cloth have come and gone,
including Typhus' father, warned off directly by the clear voice of his
Savior. A newspaper man, shamed by the part he played in inciting the lynch
mob that cost this boy his father, appalled by what he sees, goes in search of
help.
Seven will be persuaded, will try to help...and all seven will
be profoundly affected by what takes place in that one-room house that dark
night. Not all will leave alive, and all will be irrevocably changed by this
demonic struggle, and by the sound of the first notes blown of a new musical
form: jazz.
Meticulously-drawn in lyrical prose, this tale of death and
rebirth, devastation and redemption, will draw you into a world of beauty and
pain, as alluring as it is dangerous.
Read an interview with Louis
Maistros:
www.curledup.com
Meet Louis Maistros:
Thursday, September 24
Author Reading and Book Signing
7 pm, Brown University Bookstore
Providence, Rhode Island
Friday, September 25
A Conversation With Louis Maistros
4 pm, Grant Recital Hall,
Brown University
New Orleans musician and author Louis Maistros will discuss jazz in New
Orleans and how the hurricane and the city has influenced his song-writing.
Saturday, October 17
Presentation/Signing at The Louisiana Book Festival
About the Author
Louis Maistros is a longtime resident of the New Orleans
8th Ward neighborhood. A former forklift operator and self-taught writer with
no formal training, his work has appeared in publications such as the New
Orleans Times-Picayune and the Baltimore City Paper. With his wife
Elly, he owns Louie's Juke Joint, a combination jazz record shop and Vodou
botanica. He is mildly self-conscious about the fact that he shares a birthday
with Lee Harvey Oswald, and is currently working out a conspiracy theory about
that.
Author's Website |
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The Critics Praise:
"One has to write with considerable authenticity to pull off a story steeped in
magic and swamp water that examines race and class, death and rebirth, Haitian
voodoo, and the beginnings of jazz in 1891 New
Orleans...Highly recommended for all fiction collections..."
- Library Journal
"Magical realism meets the
seedy melting pot of early 20th-century New Orleans in this
richly complex novel."
- Publisher's Weekly
"Cursed lives revived and cleansed by
a 1906 New Orleans flood...The spirit realm, which in Maistros' world resides in
water, intrudes upon the living with plenty of irreverent and poignant
commentary. Riotous...
mesmerizing."
- Kirkus Review
"Deeply
original and as hypnotically strange as New Orleans itself, this novel breathes
to life a magical realm. Louis Maistros' haunting characters are at once
timeless and firmly tethered to their city's dark history."
- Elise Blackwell, author of Grub, The Unnatural History of
Cypress Parish, and Hunger
"A lyrical, complex and brave novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all
off."
- Peter Straub
"No novel since A Confederacy of Dunces has done such
justice to New Orleans."
- Donald Harington
"A
big, tremendously complex, absorbing, essential novel...easily one of the finest
and truest pieces of New Orleans fiction I've ever read."
- Poppy Z. Brite
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