Lafcadio Hearn is best known for his writings on Japan -- he immigrated to that country, married a samurai's daughter, and spent his life teaching and writing about his adopted land. But before he found himself in Japan, he lived for a decade - from 1877 to 1887 - in New Orleans.

He wrote extensively about that city and its people, and "virtually invented the national perception of New Orleans as a kind of alternative reality to the United States as a whole." He witnessed the funeral of the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, studied Creole dialects, saw the Mardi Gras carnival in the narrow streets of the French Quarter, and knew as much as anyone of his day about the last of the great duelists.

In pieces Hearn wrote as a journalist for New Orleans newspapers, and for Harper's Weekly and Scribner's Magazine, he conjured up the Big Easy as we know it today: pleasure-seeking, mysterious, slightly sinister -- entwined with voodoo, creole traditions and cuisine, and the aura of decadent decay. This volume includes articles on all these topics and features 10 newly discovered pieces. Reading Hearn on New Orleans is a trip into the past and into a world made in equal parts of truth and romantic myth. ( )