Uproot a city of artists and you will hear their cries, and New Orleans was nothing if not a gathering place for creatives. The musicians have been heard on such gut-scraping releases as Our New Orleans (Nonesuch). Now the city’s writers have begun to release their laments, notably novelist and critic Tom Piazza arguing from the heart Why New Orleans Matters and NPR commentator and poet Andrei Codrescu bookending a collection of essays and radio pieces, New Orleans, Mon Amour, with reflections on the Katrina disaster.

Both books are powerful, rich with anger, longing, and barely expressible loss. But whereas Codrescu, who first came to the city in 1982, primarily communicates through the indirect languor of a poet (or a long-time New Orleanian), Piazza, who moved to there in 1994, scores a direct hit. His book is an argument, laid out to build a case. That he is preaching to the converted — who else will read this book? — matters little. Attention must be paid. And what a case Piazza makes: first woo

Jed Perl’s New Art City is as knotty as it is ambitious. Stack your Hegel, Kant, Marx, and any and all NYC gallery guides on the nightstand: everything’s about to get real heavy.

The art critic for the New Republic, Perl has a simple premise: Manhattan in the ’30s to the ’50s was one of culture’s great artistic melting pots, a time and, more important, a place in which burgeoning styles of architecture, drama, and poetry created a febrile environment for the rise of what, along with jazz, may be America’s great indigenous art, the beast that is Abstract Expressionism. And what a many-headed monster this creature is: Action Painting, Joseph Cornell boxes, inter-faction rivalries, critical backlashes, pundits and poseurs, and work whose very abstractness can still provoke outrage.

Perl writes in the tradition of æsthetic exposition once dominated by the likes of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg — big-time players in this story — and you get the feeling that even he does

Since September 11, publishers have been rushing to supply Americans with non-fiction books about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and anything relating to the upheavals in the Middle East. They’ve been much slower about supplying us with imaginative tales from these regions, but the trickle has begun. The winter of 2006 features several new imports that are safer than a trip to Ramallah and almost as intense.

FICTION

The most notable of these works is The Gate of the Sun (Archipelago, February 1), a novel by Elias Khoury that’s set during the events of 1948, when Palestinians were displaced during the creation of Israel. As the book begins, two Palestinian men remain behind, keeping vigil at the bedside of a leader of the resistance movement. One of them begins a story about what’s just happened, and it gradually expands into a Sheherazade-like yarn of astonishing beauty.

Another superb novel to arrive on these shores from the Arab world is Tahar Ben Jel

Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best fiction and poetry books reviewed by the Phoenix in 2005.

1 THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TED BERRIGAN | EDITED BY ALICE NOTLEY WITH ANSELM BERRIGAN AND EDMUND BERRIGAN | UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS | Twenty-two years after Ted Berrigan’s sudden death, at age 48, his 758-page Collected Poems will consolidate and expand his legend. Poetry that was brash, funny, risk-taking, and fully alive when written remains bold and fresh. In life, he had legendary status on New York’s Lower East Side and wherever he taught. Loud, streetwise, stoked on speed, a man on whom little was lost, the quick-tongued Berrigan delivered his full freight whenever you encountered him. Readers new to his work will feel the man in this book.

2 CHARLES BURNS | Books

It’s all true

Here’s a selection of non-fiction books that Phoenix reviewers liked this year, in alphabetical order by author. 1 JAMES AGEE | FILM WRITING AND SELECTED JOURNALISM AND LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, AND SHORTER FICTION | LIBRARY OF AMERICA | Granted, this two-volume set mixes fiction and non-fiction, but it tips the scales slightly toward non-fiction with Agee’s film criticism and the book-length study of Alabama tenant farmers at the height of the depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (a collaboration with photographer Walker Evans). And we had to put him someplace. Seeing Agee whole for the first time, the Library of America set could finally elevate this eclectic master to the status of great American writer. 2 JEFF CHANG |