Media

PRESS RELEASE – Spring 2016

A Sonorous and Soulful Elegy: New Pop Culture Multimedia Novel is an Epic Tale of Unquenchable Spirit, Cast in the Accents and Attitudes of New Orleans

An Elegy for the Lost City, written by a career musician about New Orleans, can’t help but be jazzed up, jived, and funkified by the diverse assemblage of world-class players, homey hipsters, and denizens of the Deep South in this “down river Lake Woebegone,” so described in this pre-book release review by Pulitzer Prize-Nominated Playwright and Peabody Award Winner Willy Holtzman.

(NEW ORLEANS) — It’s sweltering and sticky, hotter than a Frenchman’s firecracker in New Orleans. An impish six-year old boy, barely a beginning trumpeter, miraculously starts playing like a lifelong master on the day after Louis Armstrong dies in 1971.  It is the dawning of the “end of times,” as told in An Elegy for the Lost City, the debut novel of Faulkner Society Award Finalist Johnny Goldstein.

Elegy is cast in the accents and attitudes of New AW-lee-uns, where elongated vowels can take on a life of their own and real life characters like Dr. John and Harry Connick Jr. pop up amid the fictitious inhabitants of this deeply-rooted, dialect-rich place.

Edited by Michael Lydon, a founding editor of Rolling Stone and dean of American rock journalists, Elegy is set among the music and restaurant worlds of New Orleans and spans the centuries in time-tripping style with the Crescent City as its epicenter. Lydon was enthralled by Goldstein’s “free-flowing prose, peppered stinging humor,”describing it as “A book to be savored like a spicy crawfish bisque – read it, but be warned of this risk: you may soon feel an overwhelming urge to experience ‘N’awlins,’ not just through Goldstein’s eyes and ears, but by spending a few weeks there yourself.”

© 2020 An Elegy for the Lost City