Desire: Tales of New Orleans

Desire: Tales of New Orleans, a debut collection of short fiction by William Sterling Walker, delves into the gay demimonde in New Orleans before the flood. Circles of friends and acquaintances—lawyers and supermarket clerks, drifters, painters and musicians, cabaret singers and writers—alternately dominate the landscape and fade into the background. However they identify themselves, they speak a common language—funny, sexy, pithy, sometimes bitchy, always on-target.

But perhaps the main cha...