Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America

Piazza (City of Refuge) uses a blues lyric in the title of this work, offering selected articles, profiles, and interviews previously published in the New York Times, the Oxford American, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere. The book, ranging from 1994, when Piazza moved to New Orleans, to the present, challenges readers with a powerful mix of humor, insight, and outrage about post-Katrina New Orleans, the blues, literature, and politics. In one piece he defends New Orleans' displaced poor against a charge that they are "lazy and parasitic" and then pronounces that readers' desire to transform New Orleans into a sanitized "museum town" is despicable. Assessing his mentor Norman Mailer, Piazza writes that one "can't approach the truth without first turning an eye on one's own subjectivity." And so, in article after article, he does. Throughout Piazza engages himself as he engages his readers. His energetic and rigorous prose keeps faith with optimism, pluralism, and compassion%E2%80%94democratic values he uncovers in American lives. The result is a book of quotable moments and glimpses of grace under pressures both manmade and natural. (Sept.)