Even as The New Republic claims in their September 10, 2010 article that “the literary response to Hurricane Katrina has been almost nonexistent,” NewSouth begs to differ. While writer Chloe Schama believes that “no major literary figure has illustrated the effects of the hurricane,” NewSouth proudly points to Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Meets Katrina, published in the wake of the storm.

Tony Dunbar, a New Orleans-based attorney and award winning author, created his seventh mystery in the Tubby Dubonnet series in order to capture the grim picture of the Crescent City in those days of chaos only five years ago. As Tubby’s tries to save his kidnapped daughter, Dunbar explores the struggles surrounding the Convention Center, the flooding jail, and the incompetence of state and local authorities. Dunbar’s depiction of the aftermath surrounding this horrific event has received high praise and many glowing reviews; Kirkus Reviews wrote that “Dunbar ushers in the era of Hurricane Katrina fiction [and] scores an even more decisive bull’s eye in his account of the disaster after the disaster.”

Additionally, Rod Davis, a Texas-based writer and editor and author of the Pen/Southwest Fiction Award-winning Corina’s Way, spent several weeks in New Orleans during the aftermath of Katrina and was able to meet with survivors and see the damage firsthand. He is writing a new novel based on of his “kind of witness-bearing” that he will forever remember. On his blog, Ochosi Chronicles, Davis writes:

It has taken me most of this time to feel that I could write about it in fiction, which I am now doing for a new novel for NewSouth Books. … We all remember what happened, and what didn’t happen, and what needs to happen. … I think everyone who cares about the South can never forget the meaning of Katrina. And not just the damage from the storm. The way the most important city in the South, if not the U.S., was left to die. And that it has not done so.

While some may believe that the proper literary respect has not been given to Hurricane Katrina and its aftershocks, NewSouth Books, along with Tony Dunbar and Rod Davis, has been working hard to present titles that convey the experience of the storm.

NewSouth novelist Rod Davis, who compellingly described the cultural tapestry of pre-Katrina New Orleans in Corina’s Way (2004), has a cover story in the February issue of D Magazine on what he calls “the biggest identity crisis in Dallas history”: the “Mexican Invasion. As our author makes clear, this is more than just a Dallas story. From the article:

Last June, a group of more than 500 economists, including five Nobel Laureates, sent an “Open Letter on Immigration” to President George W. Bush. “Overall,” the letter said, “immigration has been a net gain for American citizens, though a modest one in proportion to the size of our $13 trillion economy.” The Texas Comptroller takes a similar position. A special report issued in December says that on balance, undocumented immigrants (it used the conservative 1.4 million estimate) produced $1.58 billion in state revenues in fiscal 2005, exceeding the $1.16 billion cost of state services to them by $424.7 million. As a caveat, the report said that local governments tended to pay out more, with a net loss of $928.9 million statewide. That’s across the board. Some counties lose more than others; some probably gain. Dallas, for example, with a greater population and percentage of the undocumented, is likely to have much higher revenues than Travis County, one of those on which the comptroller’s office based its local-government estimate. And the undocumented in Dallas, according to the Dallas Fed, tend to have higher skill levels than most other parts of the state. But the most eyebrow-raising figure from the state report said that one of the best ways to consider the impact of the undocumented in Texas was to consider their disappearance, which would drop the gross state product by an estimated $17.7 billion in various kinds of lost revenues.

Davis will also be interviewed about our nation’s immigration issues on PBS’s “Think” program (KERA, FM 90.1). The program airs Thursday, January 25, 2007, between noon and 1 pm.

Davis’s PEN Southwest Book Award-winning novel Corina’s Way is available directly from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.