The Katrina Decameron is a piece of collaborative, fiction written by eight Louisiana writers in 2006. The recordings have been collected over the past four years and now the project is completed and available here in .mp3 format for idevices and media players of all kinds.
The Katrina Decameron presents (as opposed to represents) the fictional side of the storm. Each writer was a person stranded in a house in the French Quarter during Hurricane Katrina. To pass the time they had to tell stories and get to know each other. The novel begins when the electricity goes out.
Characters include: a pregnant soccer mom, a young black line cook, a northern businessman, a local (Mid-City) loose woman, a Coon Ass (what Cajun's proudly call each other), off-shore man wanderer, and two love scorned transplants struggling to start a new life in New Orleans.
The book is structured chronologically by each day of technological disaster after the storm, with individual chapter introductions written and read by Andrei Codrescu—the voice that guides the chaos.