Fifteen years after he tormented fellow students at Catahoula Bayou School, Junior Guidry is broke, drunk, one-legged, and living in a wreck of a trailer on the edge of a snake-infested swamp. He's survived an oil-rig accident that would've killed most men but, with the help of a good lawyer, made him rich instead. But he's squandered his fortune on drink, blackjack, womanizing, and brawling, leaving a wake of wrecked cars and friendships, not to mention lost or stolen wooden legs. Then th...

Justin Pitre was born and raised on his grandfather’s Louisiana bayou, and he has made a promise to keep his family’s prized 500-acre property safe. But across town, Big-Tex oil bigwig Tom Huff and his company have major plans to cash in on the resources that lie below the bayou by ramming a dragline through the Pitre property. Justin and his fiery wife Grace go to all lengths to stop their bayou from being destroyed, but they might not know exactly what they’re up against.Featurin...

The capstone of Ken Wells’s acclaimed Catahoula Bayou trilogy, Logan’s Storm tracks the epic journey of Logan LaBauve as he flees corrupt cops while trying to lead Chilly Cox—the teenager whose “crime” was rescuing Logan’s son, Meely, from a racist bully—to safety. But dodging two-footed predators deep in the Cajun backwaters turns out to be the easy part. As Logan, accompanied by a newfound love interest, heads to Florida to lie low, a killer hurricane springs from the Gulf—and l...

Do beer yeast rustlers really exist? Who patented the Beer Goddess? How can you tell a Beer Geek from a Beer Nazi? Where exactly is Beervana? Does Big Beer hate Little Beer?Ken Wells, a novelist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and longtime Wall Street Journal writer, answers these questions and more by bringing a keen eye and prodigious reportage to the people and passions that have propelled beer into America's favorite alcoholic beverage and the beer industry into a $75 billion commerci...

Fifteen-year-old Meely LaBauve is growing up on Catahoula Bayou and living by his wits. His father is an alligator hunter, still unable to cope with the death of his wife eight years earlier. He finds comfort in bottles of hooch and with companionable women and disappears for days at a time. School, for Meely, is a long, dusty walk away in a place where truancy isn't a top priority. "Up at Catahoula School, we've got all the grades. I'm in ninth when I'm in anything," says Meely. But the l...

**On any given day, millions of Wall Street Journal readers put aside the serious business and economic news of the day to focus first on the paper's middle column (a.**k.a. the A-hed), a virtual sound-bubble for light literary fare -- a short story, a tall tale, an old yarn, a series of vignettes, and other unexpected delights that seem to "float off the page." In this first-ever compendium of middle-column pieces, you'll find an eclectic selection of writings, from the outlandis...

A sprightly, deeply personal narrative about how gumbo—for 250 years a Cajun and Creole secret—has become one of the world’s most beloved dishes.Ask any self-respecting Louisianan who makes the best gumbo and the answer is universal: “Momma.” The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo, in fact, reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans—all ha...

Ken Wells’s highly acclaimed picaresque Catahoula Bayou novels introduced “one of the most compelling voices in fiction of the last decade” (Los Angeles Times). Now Wells is back, writing about his favorite subject–the exotic, beleaguered Louisiana wetlands–in a sharp, rollicking tale of corporate corruption and political shenanigans. The fight over one man’s tract of sacred marsh fronts a deeper story of our place in the environment and our obligations to it.Justin Pitre’...

Rascal may be the happiest beagle ever to live. He used to live on Voclain’s Farm, with its whole jambalaya of dogs, but now he lives with his very own boy, Meely. Together they explore the Louisiana bayou, bunny chasin’, coon and squirrel huntin’, and crawfishin’. But when Meely gets stuck on a rotting bridge deep in the bayou, it’s up to Rascal—with a little help from his old friends at the farm—to save his boy from danger.In the spirit of Huckleberry Finn, Rascal

“Boudin is what the gods would eat if the gods were looking for the transcendent; a dish as satisfying to the soul as it is to the palate.” So writes Ken Wells, Louisiana native and boudin hound, in this lively travelogue through the aromatic precincts of the makers, sellers, and connoisseurs of what one noted Louisiana chef calls the world’s most versatile sausage. Sure, boudin is just pork, rice, veggies, and spices in a casing. Yet in creative hands—and there are many in Louisiana—the l...

Having snagged a job for a high-end swamp tour company, Jack Cane Landry-Louisiana homeboy and self-professed swamp rat-wants to ditch school and guide fulltime. Poised, attractive, and well-traveled, Olivia FitzGerald loves her private New York City prep school and is Harvard bound. When Olivia and her philanthropist father jet in for a tour Jack will help guide, these wildly different teens are flung together in dire circumstances. The plane carrying the party to their remote campsite cr...

Ask any self-respecting Louisianan who makes the best gumbo and the answer is universal: "Momma." The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo, in fact, reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans—all had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that continues to delight and nourish so many? And what explains its spread around the world?A seasoned journalist, Ke...