Devil Sent the Rain

by Tom Piazza

  The Charlie Chan Chanthology (six DVDs, MGM) picks up where the 20th Century Fox series leaves off, collecting Chan films featuring Sidney Toler, including The Secret Service, The Chinese Cat, The Jade Mask, Meeting at Midnight, The Scarlet Clue, and The Shanghai Cobra.

  Jelly Roll Morton

  Complete Library of Congress Recordings (eight CDs, Rounder) is the definitive collection of Morton’s recordings for Alan Lomax, featuring both spoken-word and musical performances.

  Joe Liggins

  “Going Back to New Orleans” can be found on The Shuffle Boogie King: Joe Liggins and his Honeydrippers (two CDs, Proper).

  Dr. John’s CD Goin’ Back to New Orleans (Warner Bros.) closes with his own version.

  Norman Mailer

  Mailer wrote more than thirty books of wildly varying quality, almost all of which have something interesting going on that nobody else would have come up with. If you haven’t read him, the five that I would recommend to begin with are The Naked and the Dead (his first book, a World War II novel that made him an instant celebrity at age twenty-five), The Armies of the Night (a journalistic piece on the 1967 March on the Pentagon, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award), The Executioner’s Song (his stunning “nonfiction novel” about the crime and punishment of Gary Gilmore, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (a classic of political reportage, on the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions), and Advertisements for Myself, a seminal collection of essays in which Mailer first found his own distinctive voice.

  If you want another five, try the novel An American Dream; the essay collections The Presidential Papers and Cannibals and Christians; his fantastic The Fight, about the 1974 Ali-Foreman championship bout; and his slim, brilliant polemic against the Iraq invasion, Why Are We at War?. The last title is also available as an audio book from Random House Audible through iTunes, read aloud by Mailer himself. It is well worth getting.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Madame Bovary is available in several translations, including a new one by Lydia Davis (Viking, 2010). My own reading is based on the translation I am most familiar with, by Francis Steegmuller (currently available as a Vintage paperback or Everyman’s Library hardcover). Steegmuller also wrote Flaubert and Madame Bovary, one of the great literary biographies, newly reissued by NYRB Classics.

  Credits

  Cover design by Adam Johnson

  Cover photographs: courtesy of

  Jimmy Martin; Carl Perkins, Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan © Getty Images; Tom Piazza by Rick Gargiulo; Gillian Welch by John Chiasson

  Also by Tom Piazza

  Fiction

  City of Refuge

  My Cold War

  Blues And Trouble: Twelve Stories

  Nonfiction

  Why New Orleans Matters

  Understanding Jazz: Ways to Listen

  True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass

  Blues Up and Down: Jazz in Our Time

  The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz

  Setting the Tempo: Fifty Years of Great Jazz Liner Notes (editor)

  Copyright

  DEVIL SENT THE RAIN. Copyright © 2011 by Tom Piazza. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-06-200822-0

  EPub Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780062094926

  11 12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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