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This site best view using Internet Explorer 7.0 at a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. Last updated August 2008. |
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Also new from Ken Wells... in paperback… the quest for the perfect beer joint |
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“I highly recommend this (burrrrp) book.” —Dave Barry |
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Slashing winds, buzz-saw rain, hit-and-run tornadoes—and the real scary stuff is yet to come… With a colorful family history of defying storms, Ricky and Ronald Robin, seafaring cousins who trace their bayou roots back more than 230 years, make a fateful decision to ride out Hurricane Katrina on their hand-hewn shrimp boats in sheltered harbor below New Orleans. They think they’ve seen it all until Hurricane Katrina springs a late surprise—killer surges loosed by failed levees and monstrous tides. Suddenly, they must summon all their courage, wit and seamanship to save themselves and hundreds of others cast into the maw of the most destructive hurricane in U.S. history... Coming this month from Ken Wells and A tale redolent of “The Perfect Storm” and “Bayou Farewell”... Fighting to save a way of life in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
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And Ken’s fourth novel from Random House... |
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New! Diary of a storyteller…Read Ken’s account of his evolution as a writer in the current issue of Mayborn magazine. |
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From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a true story of adventure, courage, grit and the struggle and longing to reclaim lives and homes in a place terribly upended...
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Click here to continue reading the first chapter |
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An excerpt...A Monster Cometh… Violet Canal, St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, August 29, 2005 Chapter 1/Ricky at the Helm RICKY ROBIN suddenly has a bad feeling about things. It’s well beyond midnight, maybe 3 a.m., who knows. Ricky’s lost track of time. It’s incorrigibly dark beyond the glare of his generator-powered floodlights mounted above the fore and aft decks of the Lil’ Rick, the sturdy 56-foot steel trawler he built with his own hands three decades before. The wind has picked up and is bawling like a rabid cat; rain is machine-gunning his wheelhouse windows. The Lil’ Rick is beginning to shudder and rock and, worse, tilt. It’s not supposed to tilt. Ricky Robin, a seaman all his life, has tied down plenty of boats in plenty of storms. His boats, once tied down, just don’t tilt. Besides, the Lil’ Rick is tied down with redundant ropes—ten in all--and under power, and Ricky, or so he believes, has history and lore on his side. He’s hunkered down at Violet Canal, a man-dug appendage to an ancient natural bayou named Dupre. It’s been a trustworthy hurricane hole for the storm-wise local shrimping and oyster fleet going back to the days of Reconstruction. Bounded by 12-foot-high levees north and south, the canal dead-ends at an abandoned lock just off a major thoroughfare called the St. Bernard Highway, and less than two-hundred yards from the towering levees of the Mississippi River on the west. |
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Photo by Ken Wells Copyright 2005 |
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“In the glut of works about Katrina...Wells has found a fresh, compelling story. As a bonus, he is a superb reporter and accomplished stylist. Of the dozen Katrina books I have read so far...“The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous” will stay with me the most vividly.” —Steve Weinberg, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Aug. 24 |
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Glowing early reviews for the Good Pirates...coming soon from Yale University Press... |
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“Literary journalism at its best.”—Don Ranley, University of Missouri School of Journalism |
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“Vivid re-creation of Hurricane Katrina's devastating impact on an unusual fishing community outside New Orleans...A heartfelt tribute to badly battered folks whose "gritty blue-collar pluck," declares Wells, may yet save their bayou way of life. —Kirkus Reviews
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