Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Featuring Words & Music

These programs aresupported by grants from
The Louisiana Division of the Arts,
Office of Cultural
Development, Department of Culture, Recreation & Tourism
In cooperation with the
Louisiana State Arts Council
and a grant from the City of
New Orleans.

Both grants are administered through
the Arts Council of New Orleans

Moira Crone

Winner of Robert Penn Warren Prize

for

Fiction

About The Author

Moira Crone has published one novel, A Period of Confinement, and three books of stories, most recently, What Gets Into Us. Her short fiction has appeared in Oxford American, The New Yorker, Image, Mademoiselle, Triquarterly, Habitus, and New Orleans Review and more 40 other journals and twelve anthologies, including five times in New Stories From The South. She has won the Faulkner -Wisdom Gold Medal for Best Novella and the Gold medal for Best Short Story awarded bythe Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society. In 2009 she was awarded the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Southern Fellowship of Writers for the body of her work. Allan Gurganus stated in the citation:

Crone charts a zone of family resemblance and family claustrophobia. Her work can be hilarious in dealing with contemporary moral relativism; but it always holds true to abiding faith in certain primitive, reassuring pleasures. The writer's ability to find language that approximates extreme emotional states lifts her work far above most mere quotidian realism. Moira Crone is a fable maker with a musical ear, a plentitude of nerve, and an epic heart for her beleaguered, if often witty, characters. Moira Crone's growing reputation is richly deserved. The Warren Prize should bring this writer's writer an even wider readership.

Her latest novel, The Not Yet, is due out March, 2012.

Moira also is an accomplished fine artist, who paints under the name "Mo Lion." Some of her work currently is on exhibit at the Crescent City BrewHouse, 527 Decatur St.and can also be seen on her facebook: www.facebook.com/molionart.

A new painting by author/artist Moira Crone

And big news for Moira and her husband, author Rodger Kamenetz, their daughter, Anya. Anya, another writer, who made a big splash with her first non-fiction book, Generation Debt, is about to give them their first grandchild. Moira's younger daughter Kezia has been a winner of the Faulkner Society's Gold Medal for Best Short Story by a High School
Student and was intern editor for the Society's journal, The Double Dealer, in 2006.

Like Moira, Rodger Kamenetz has been a regular presenter at
Words & Music since its inception.

Moira Crone with her husband, poet and bestseling non-fiction author Rodger Kamenetz, at Jazz After Hours at the Napoleon House.

About Her New Novel: The Not Yet

It's 2121; the Heirs control society's resources from their lavish walled city-states. Through life extension, they live hundreds of years. Outside, the poor barely survive. Malcolm de Lazarus, twenty, is a "Not Yet," one counting on joining the elite. But when his fortune mysteriously disappears, he must sail to the chaotic New Orleans Islands for answers. On the way, he encounters the darkest side of Heirs' privilege, which threatens everything he knows and loves.

From her vast and tasty imagination, Moira Crone has fashioned a post-apocalyptic picaresque to rival Riddley Walker and Fiskadoro. In The Not Yet, her foundling Malcolm navigates a bizarre, fallen New Orleans as strange and wonderful as the real one.
—Stewart O’Nan, author of Emily Alone, The Odds, Names of the Dead, and Snow Angels, and 14 other |
books of fiction.

A vivid, suspenseful, and (literally) layered imagining of what's to become of New Orleans and humanity (a new kind of love?) in the Twenty-Second Century.
—Roy Blount, Jr., author of Alphabetter Juice and 21 other Non-Fiction Books,

Moira Crone's simple observation that New Orleanians, like people everywhere, really want to live forever, clearly leads into a world of ethical marvels, perversities hitherto undreamed of. Her narrator, an ambitious outsider, a pure Dickensian foundling, is perfectly situated to guide the reader on a revelatory journey to where we are headed right now.
—Valerie Martin, winner of Great Britain's Orange Prize, author of Property, Mary Reilly, Trespass, and other novels

You are an Heir. You are part of an elite who know the secret to longevity. Your purpose is to live forever in phenomenal wealth. You eat tasteless nothings to maintain your perfectly sculpted, synthetic body. You love when and if it is appropriate. But if you are Malcolm, the Not-Yet of Moira Crone's futuristic novel, you see the Heirs as the "bonesnakes" they are, you hunger for real food, and you want to love Camille, who can never be an Heir. How much are you willing to risk, what sacrifices will you make? Your fortune? Your future? Your life? The Not Yet is adventure, fantasy and romance. Most of all it is Crone's brilliant vision of life in the New Orleans Islands a century after Katrina. Once you are taken into its powerful grip, you will see that the world she describes may be no father away than the next great flood. —Chris Wiltz, author of The Last Madam, The Killing Circle, A Diamond Before You Die, The Emerald Lizard, ,and The Glass House.

Moira Crone's The Not Yet is as thought-provoking as a novel can get. Set in a future dystopian New Orleans that is run by people who think they have figured out how to live forever, the story contains echoes of Jonathan Swift. It's a captivating meditation on the curious way love springs out of what we give up in life, not what we gain.
—Tim Gautreaux, author of The Clearing and Welding with Children

One of our finest writers...
—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and 12 novels, including most recently, A Small Hotel.

...utterly sui generis
—Gary Krist, New York Times critic and author of City of Scoundrels and other works of ftction and narrative
non-fiction.

Precise and hallucinatory at the same time.
—Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and nine other novels.