Lives of the Saints

Fresh out of college in New England, a young woman returns home to New Orleans and is quickly pulled back into the city’s “wastrel-youth contingent” in this cult-classic novel of love and decadence, now with a new introduction.

Nancy Lemann’s voice is one of the most unusual in American fiction, unabashedly digressive, weirdly and wonderfully confiding, as witty as it is melancholy, an endless surprise. Hers is a voice born of and at odds with her native New Orleans, a voice that takes on an...