Nancy Lemann — The Oyster Diaries
Nancy Lemann's novel follows a New Orleans family across generations, using the city's rituals and eccentricities as the lens for a study of time and memory.
Why we picked this
Lemann is one of American fiction's most distinctive voices — her New Orleans novels have a tone that no one else is writing. This is a serious literary event for readers who find most fiction too predictable.
Nancy Lemann is the author of Lives of the Saints, Sportsman’s Paradise, and several other novels set in New Orleans — books admired for their eccentric syntax, their deep feeling for place, and their refusal to follow conventional narrative logic. The Oyster Diaries continues in this vein, following a family whose relationship to the city is inseparable from the city’s relationship to its own past.
Lemann is a writer’s writer, which means her events tend to attract readers who have been waiting for this kind of work for a long time. The conversation with Terence Monmaney will likely address the mechanics of her style as much as the novel’s content — how she builds sentences, why New Orleans keeps pulling her back, and what literary fiction can do that other kinds of storytelling cannot.
This is an evening for readers who care about American prose at its most idiosyncratic and most committed.