“Most of you, used to big fat red and yellow leaves and brisk winds smelling of apples, wouldn’t recognize it. But here in the deep deep South in the dreamy mud of the riverbend at New Orleans, we do know it. It’s only a change in the light, a knifeblade-thin change from bright white to reddish.”

—Andrei Codrescu, the essay “Hint of Fall,” from New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City, 2006.