NEW ORLEANS STORIES: Great Writers on the...

NEW ORLEANS STORIES: Great Writers on the City edited by John Miller and Genevieve Anderson (Chronicle Books: $10.95). New Orleans must rank as the most romanticized city in America, and this rather mixed bag of fact and fiction attempts to capture the city’s distinctive atmosphere. Zora Neale Hurston’s “Hoodoo” and Truman Capote’s “Dazzle” describe the fascination the supernatural holds for the residents of New Orleans, and no other town would tolerate the flamboyant eccentricities of Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces.” Not all the selections are so well-chosen: Lyle Saxon’s collection of bizarre-sounding folk remedies hardly qualifies as the work of a great writer. John James Audubon had little to say about the city--the excerpt from the great naturalist’s diary reveals he was more interested in the regional bird life--but the sweaty, evocative portrait of Mardi Gras in John Rechy’s “City of Night” isn’t included.