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Lives of the Saints

Lives of the Saints

by Nancy Lemann, introduction by Geoff Dyer

$16.95
$16.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Literature in English
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Nancy Lemann’s voice is one of the most unusual in American fiction, unabashedly digressive, weirdly and wonderfully confiding, as witty as it is melancholy, an endless surprise. Hers is a voice born of and at odds with her native New Orleans, a voice that takes on and wonders at the ramshackle realities not just of the deep South but of America. Lives of the Saints, her first book, was a revelation of new talent. Reappearing here, almost fifty years later, it is simply a revelation. 

“Claude Collier made the world seem kind,” says Louise Brown, beginning a tale of Violent Love, Breakdowns, Moods, and Felonious Drunkenness that floats from one lush, green, sweltering New Orleans evening to another. When Louise returns home after four years of college in New England, she bemusedly finds herself re-immersed in New Orleans society’s “wastrel-youth contingent.” At the center of this gin-fuelled hurricane is Claude Collier, rumpled, accident prone, supremely sweet—and desperate. For Claude, Louise is his steadying focus; for Louise, Claude is the only man who can cause her heart to “break into a million pieces on the floor.”

By turns elegiac and eccentric, inscribing the South’s hallmarks of defeat and refuge in a group of people as intense and adrift as one could encounter, Lives of the Saints is as tender and moving now as ever.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230281
Pages: 160
Publication Date:

Praise

A lovely nutty book about a lovely nutty girl . . . Hilarious, haunting, poignant.
―Walker Percy

Spikily comic . . . This is how Blanche DuBois talked before the lampshade was torn away and life became lit with a naked bulb.
―James Wolcott, New York Review of Books

Think of Lives of the Saints as a long poem―a hysterically funny poem that is also beautifully written . . . Words are slung about recklessly, piled in staggering heaps, and what emerges from them is an almost hypnotic portrait of unforgettable people in a strange and magnificent city . . . Warming and endearing, brilliant.
―Ann Tyler, The New Republic

Nancy Lemann has taken the South away from the Sun Belters and returned it to a clutch of New Orleans natives who know how to give decadence a good name . . . If the Crescent City should find itself in the grip of a population explosion, they can blame Nancy Lemann for making her readers want to move there. I want to have a drink at that Lafayette Hotel.
―Florence King, Los Angeles Times Book Review

A modern Fitzgerald is launched . . . Lemann's style can manage succinctness, wit, and pathos all in the same sentence.
―Cleveland Plain Dealer

Striking . . . richly rewarding . . . Reminiscent of the works of Eudora Welty and the late Tennessee Williams.
―Booklist

Brilliant . . . Party scenes worthy of Evelyn Waugh . . . and a very funny portrait of a people and place that haven't changed much since the Civil War.
―Kirkus Reviews

A tremendous first novel . . . with the mysterious subtlety of great writing.
―Vogue

The author's not inconsiderable feat is the creation of a world that is simultaneously wry, absurd and moving . . . A formidable debut performance from a novelist of exceptional gifts.
―Boston Globe

Witty, memorable, and original . . . Louise's tale of decency and self-destruction is poignant, serious, subtle. Lives of the Saints, in its flow of observations and feelings, is a superb portrait of a people whose day is not yet done.
―Vanity Fair

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