Buy this new compilation, reviewed by Jamie James (thanks, Bill): … Hearn had a rare gift for bringing a place to bustling, scented, gorgeously tinted life. Anyone who has spent time along the Gulf of Mexico in the summer, for example, will instantly feel the rightness of this passage, about a thunderstorm in New Orleans: “A packed herd of low-bellying clouds lumbered up from the Gulf; crowded blackly against the sun; flickered, thundered, and burst in torrential rain — tepid, perpendicular — and vanished utterly away. Then, more furiously than before, the sun flamed down; — roofs and pavements steamed; the streets seemed to smoke; the air grew suffocating with vapor; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odor, — a stale smell, as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould, — as of grasses decomposing after a flood.” It was a prose style that served Hearn well throughout his life-long travels.
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