Desire: Tales of New Orleans
"William Sterling Walker is a wonderful writer, fluent, warm, intelligent and real. His stories about gay life in New Orleans are firmly rooted in place, and all his characters, gay and straight, are observed with a wise heart and a deep soul."--Christopher Bram, author of Eminent Outlaws"Desire is a sensuous, nostalgic, and evocative collection of stories set in sultry New Orleans before that dreamy dream got washed away."--Valerie Martin, winner of the Orange Prize for Property"These are stories that ask to be lived in--gorgeous, moody, sophisticated--not unlike the vividly conjured New Orleans that William Sterling Walker's haunted characters inhabit, flee from, inevitably return to. Walker is a brilliant guide through the labyrinth of this city and these seething lives, fluent in the mutually reinforcing tropes of desire and regret."--Paul Russell, author of The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov"This beautiful collection is not so much a set of stories as an intricate song cycle, one that arranges and rearranges recurrent fragments of memory and sensation--light, fragrance, and music--like the tesserae of a mosaic, the shifting patterns converging into a haunting panorama of the life of our ecstatic, fated generation of gay men."--Mark Merlis, author of American Studies and An Arrow's Flight"Desire is dreamy and affecting, stories of a New Orleans that was gone before Katrina ever got there. It's been a while since I've read a collection so well written, so intricately composed, with such beautiful and evocative descriptions of a time and a place."--Caroline Fraser, author of God's Perfect Child and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution