About the Author

Mark LaFlaur grew up in the South, mostly in Louisiana. He earned an MFA degree at Louisiana State University, where he worked on the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse. The author of Elysian Fields, a novel of New Orleans, he has also written for The American Scholar, The New Criterion, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Village Voice. He has worked in book publishing in New York, San Francisco, and in New Orleans, where he wrote Elysian Fields.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 he founded Levees Not War, a New York–based, New Orleans–dedicated blog focusing on infrastructure and the environment, which led to his second book, What Fresh Hell? The Best of Levees Not War: Blogging on Post-Katrina New Orleans and America, 2005–2015. (See the Rising Tide blog’s profile of Mark and Levees Not War here.) He is a senior production editor for a major book publisher and lives with his wife, Janet, in New York City.

Letter of Recommendation

“I think of Mark LaFlaur as New Orleans’s cultural ambassador to New York, and, indeed, to the nation. Mark’s love of the city and culture of New Orleans has motivated him to keep kindred spirits around the U.S. and beyond informed and involved, through spirited writing, blogging, and civic engagement, in the triumphs and troubles of his native region.”

—Richard Campanella, Tulane University geographer and author of Bienville’s Dilemma and Geographies of New Orleans

About Books, Authors, Writing

• “The whispers of Joseph Joubert: On Paul Auster’s translation of the French aphorist,” The New Criterion, May 2025
• “The Birth of the Egghead Paperback”: On Jason Epstein and the founding of Anchor Books, or, How one very young man changed the course of publishing and intellectual life in America, The American Scholar, Spring 2022
• “The Worse It Gets, the Closer We Are to Renovation”: An interview with Jacques Barzun, The American Scholar, March 2019
• Biographical introduction of Jacques Barzun in “The Writing Life: A Talk between Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Jacques Barzun.” Los Angeles Times Book Review, Sunday, May 21, 2000, p. 3.
• “Continuing the Conversation”: On Meeting Jacques Barzun (for the Jacques Barzun Centennial, Columbia University, 2007).
• The Boston Review, April/May 1996. Review of Peter Gadol’s Closer to the Sun (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
• The Boston Review, December 1994/January 1995. Review of Lawrence David’s Need (New York: Random House, 1994).
• Village Voice, November 5, 1991. Review of Padgett Powell’s Typical (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991).
• San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday Review of Books, September 8, 1991. Review of Padgett Powell’s Typical (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991).
• American Book Review, Dec. 1991/Jan. 1992. Review of Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry, ed. Warren Slesinger (Columbia, S.C.: Bench Press, 1991).