“In Vicki Salloum’s brilliant New Orleans novel, Faulkner & Friends, hope is the banner that is waved against insurmountable odds, proudly, defiantly. Here, the usual tourist-friendly props are cast aside so that we may venture into the souls of the very real (if too often invisible) people that make the city what it is, their vices as tragically beautiful as their virtues. In Salloum’s soulful telling, we learn that the greatest hope of all sometimes arrives in that awkward moment where we find the courage to reach out to our sworn enemy with love and understanding. It is in this moment of realization that we see the formerly invisible thread that unites us all, at long last informing us as to why so many of us would rather live here in misery than anywhere else in mediocrity. It is rare to find an author who is able to put the joy and tragedy that exists at the heart of the City of New Orleans together into the same room, each fully aware of the other and neither ashamed of what it sees, to uncover a story that each reader must acknowledge in some way as his own. Faulkner & Friends is a joy to read, its prose as musical as its message is satisfyingly poignant. A very welcome addition to the New Orleans literary canon.”
–Louis Maistros, Author of The Sound of Building Coffins and Anti-requiem: New Orleans Stories