Kirjahaku

"Many of Friedmann's stories contain an admixture of quirkiness, with elements of dark humor. Most of the stories contain startling surprise endings that this reviewer hesitates to explain, lest the surprise be ruined. These stories are truly enjoyable-New Orleans Review of BooksOver the course of her novel-writing career, New Orleans writer Patty Friedmann also has written short stories that resonate with her darkly comic voice. This collection offers the best-some old, some new, some before Katrina, a few written after she unscrambled her mind from not evacuating for the storm.What the reader finds here are the New Orleans characters only locals recognize. Patty doesn't venture much into the French Quarter; she doesn't do public drunkenness; she certainly never secondlines. Instead she shares what might be her most memorable character, Jerusha Bailey, a mean old white woman who loses her husband's ashes in a McDonald's parking lot. And Darby, the smart girl who lives in a New Orleans gingerbread house but is tormented by her dumb brick-house-dwelling private school classmates-with tragic consequences. Patty takes us back to the time when Mr. Bingle was hoisted every Christmas onto the front of Maison Blanche on Canal Street in New Orleans. But she also brings young cynics into the flooded city after the storm. We meet lonely men and controlling women, yet we smile crookedly. Patty Friedmann's bio says she has lived all her life in New Orleans "except for education and natural disasters," and it shows. Walker Percy once said, "I make bold to predict that the next Southern literary revival will be led by a Jewish mother," and he went on to describe her as "a shrewd self-possessed woman with a sharp eye." It has been said that this is Patty Friedmann. The reader can see it here.

A zany, disturbing novel set amid the splendors and excesses of New Orleans.. Eleanor Rushing is a first-person narrative tour de force. While Eleanor is blessed with acute powers of observation and the ability to remember everything, her recollections and impressions are nevertheless often at odds with those of the people around her. As her "relationship" with a local married Methodist minister spins out of control, the loquacious and endearing Eleanor manages to charm us completely. Even as we begin to realize that surviving a childhood marred by tragedy has exacted a terrible toll, we can't help being her willing and faithful admirers.

A darkly comic novel about personal triage in the face of life's odds-the odds of genetics, of finding and keeping love, and of rescue and survival.. Anna Riggs Duffy and her husband, George, live in New Orleans with their two very different identical twins. One day there is a tragic accident, and Anna can save only one of the boys. In their grief, George turns to another woman while Anna turns to the slot machines in the waterfront casinos. How will she win George back, and does she really want to, anyway? In Odds, Patty Friedmann explores the darker sides of humor, love, and family.