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253rd out of 598 books
—
1,401 voters
The House on Coliseum Street
To twenty-year-old Joan Mitchell, her fate seems sealed and strangely inconsequential: inheritance of the stately New Orleans house she shares with her oppressive mother and undermining half-sister, and marriage to an ill-matched steady boyfriend. Then a brief affair with Michael Kern, a man she knows to be a cad but is drawn to anyway, unfurls for Joan a surrealistic sequ...more
Paperback, 242 pages
Published
October 1st 1996
by Louisiana State University Press
(first published 1961)
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Shirley Ann Grau was is an important voice in the 20th literature of the American South, and more specifically to the category known as "Southern Gothic". "The House on Coliseum Street" is a somber psychological study about suppressed volition and identity. The antagonist, 22-year old Jane Mitchell, lives with an oppressive mother and an undermining half sister in the New Orleans mansion she has inherited from her father, one of her mother's several divorced husbands. Jane's very brief affair w...more
abortion.
privilege.
southern.
green raincoat.
So I decided to gave Grau another chance. The house on Coliseum Street is located in New Orleans, LA and the occupants are a mother, her husband, and the mother's five daughters. The narrator of the story is the eldest daughter, 20-year-old Joan Mitchell.
The matriarch of the family, Aurelie Caillet, is a true southern belle to the very core of her being. Aurelie was by far my favorite character. She has been married five times having a daughter with ea...more
privilege.
southern.
green raincoat.
So I decided to gave Grau another chance. The house on Coliseum Street is located in New Orleans, LA and the occupants are a mother, her husband, and the mother's five daughters. The narrator of the story is the eldest daughter, 20-year-old Joan Mitchell.
The matriarch of the family, Aurelie Caillet, is a true southern belle to the very core of her being. Aurelie was by far my favorite character. She has been married five times having a daughter with ea...more
Well, this book did something that I thought was not possible...it made me homesick for New Orleans. She beautifully evokes the sights, sounds and smells of Uptown, interweaving them between a somewhat insubstantial story that contains the usual suspects in Southern writing, including the madman in the attic. Having lived in New Orleans for 38 years, I found this to be a wonderfully enjoyable book...but not sure what my take on it would have been under different circumstances.
Cringe-inducing characters, but so believable. The women of 1960s in New Orleans are right there in the living room with you, and they are bored, limited in their lives, and not very nice because of that.
This is a very short book. I have read it twice. Set in New Orleans. I recommend it. Especially if you like Carson McCullars type stories.
Haunting, poetic, and masterful. I beautiful portrayal of 1950s New Orleans.
Psychological study of a young woman's reaction to a traumatic event when she realizes her mother and aunt are going to pretend it never happened. Well done. The domineering, emotionally distant, proper mother is particularly well drawn. The atmosphere of New Orleans in the '50s is nicely evoked, but never gets in the way of the character and her story.
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Shirley Ann Grau (b. 1929) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist of nine novels and short story collections, whose work is set primarily in her native South. Grau was raised in Alabama and Louisiana, and many of her novels document the broad social changes of the Deep South during the twentieth century, particularly as they affected African Americans. Grau’s first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), a...more
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