Octavia Books

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Please join us for an evening celebrating the release of WHERE YOU KNOW" New Orleans As Home. Editior David Rutledge and contributors will read selections from the book, followied by a book signing. This second book of a planned trilogy follows Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? (2006).
Five years later, New Orleans is still striving to recover. Where We Know: New Orleans as Home contains voices of people who stayed on to rebuild and those who no longer think of New Orleans as home. It also weaves in historical quotations from Louis Armstrong, Lafcadio Hearn, Walker Percy and many others. Their words give context to the topic of living in this culturally complex place. The culture of New Orleans can be as obvious as Bourbon Street or as subtle as a trumpet. Always, though, there is a passion for the culture and for the city.
Those who choose to leave or are unable to come back still have an intense sense of what this city is all about. Those who stay often do so with dedication, doubts and a sense that no other city can replace this one. Where We Know conveys that intense sense the joys and rewards, the fears and dangers of making this city ones home.
Priced at only $16, this paperback features several high-quality papers, a dust jacket, foil stamping, blind debossing, 24 pages of full color printing, photographs, reproductions of historic maps and prints ... need we say more?

David Rutledge is a literature professor at the University of New Orleans and the editor of the post-Katrina anthology Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?

Join us for a reading & signing with Olivia deBelle Byrd featuring MISS HILDRETH WORE BROWN - Anecdotes of a Southern Belle. Byrd, a self-described Southern Belle, says the collection of humorous essays that deal with everything from parties where society ladies wear Christmas trees with blinking lights hanging from their ears, to stories about Sunday church, where a mink coat is mistaken for a possum, all come from personal experiences. After I was telling one of my many stories for the umpteenth time, my long-suffering husband looked at me with glazed over eyes and said, Why dont you just write this stuff down? So I did.
With comparisons to Fannie Flagg, Olivia deBelle Byrd offers up storytelling written in the finest Southern tradition. With wit and amusement, Byrd delves into the world of the Deep South with all its unique idiosyncrasies.
Essays in the collection include characters who dance across the page from Great-Aunt Lottie Mae, who is as old-fashioned and opinionated as the day is long, to Mrs. Brewton who calls everyone dahling whether they are darling or not, to Isabella with her passion for mint juleps and drama, both in equal measure.

With Miss Hildreth Wore Brown, Olivia deBelle Byrd proves that she is the real thingan authentic Southern Belle with stories galore. I cant wait to give this hilarious and heartwarming book to all my sweet friends.
Cassandra King,author of The Same Sweet Girls

Enter the fascinating world of reclusive nature-lover Walter Anderson when children's books author Hester Bass returns to Octavia Books to sign THE SECRET WORLD OF WALTER ANDERSON.
Residents along the Mississippi Gulf Coast thought Walter Anderson was odd, rowing across twelve miles of open water in a leaky skiff to reach Horn, an uninhabited island without running water or electricity. But this solitary artist didnt much care what they thought as he spent weeks at a time on his personal paradise, sleeping under his boat, sometimes eating whatever washed ashore, sketching and painting the natural surroundings and the animals that became his friends. Here Walter created some of his most brilliant watercolors, work he kept hidden during his lifetime. In a beautifully crafted picture book biography, writer Hester Bass and Caldecott Honor-winning illustrator E. B. Lewis pay homage to an uncompromising American artist.