THE SOUND OF BUILDING COFFINS by Louis Maistros SIGNED

The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros (Toby Press), First Edition Hardcover, Signed by Author

Offered here is a signed first edition copy of the critically acclaimed New Orleans historical novel, The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros, a supernatural tale of catastrophe and rebirth in New Orleans at the dawn of the jazz age. The Sound of Building Coffins has become a cult hit in the New Orleans area -- and its following is rapidly spreading throughout the world.

Upon request, the author will personally inscribe this copy to the buyer.

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Some reviews of The Sound of Building Coffins:

"The Sound of Building Coffins is filled with the music of New Orleans -- the richly imagined siren song of Buddy Bolden's horn, cacophony to some, sweet inspiration to others; the lapping waves of the Mississippi; the clamor of Storyville barrooms; the banter of street corners.

"This is a novel about love and life and death, New Orleans-style, when a cure can take the form of a healing or an abortion or an exorcism; where a hand on a heart can be a blessing or a burden; where the dead walk among the living and are known and listened to; where spirits live on and on, to torment or to love.

"Maistros creates a city that is part dream, part hallucination. His New Orleans embodies both the grim reality of a particular time and the city's eternal, shimmering beauty. And, with the book's title, he provides us with a new and unforgettable metaphor for the sound of hammers at work, whether boarding up for a storm or rebuilding after one."
-- Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune & USA Today

"(The Sound of Building Coffins is) a macabre and utterly hypnotic feat of literary imagination, an extended tale of voodoo and jazz in the Crescent City, circa the turn of the 20th century. The novel is so fluently delivered that it sometimes feels as if it were being channeled via the same spirits - evil and good - that inhabit these richly drawn characters.

"Maistros, a New Orleans record-store owner and former forklift operator with no formal training as a writer, has crafted a work spiked with historical characters and events, so striking and original that it probably deserves a place on the shelf of great fiction from his adopted hometown."
-- Phillip Booth, St. Petersburg Times

"Louis Maistros has written a lyrical, complex, and brave novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off. He is a writer to watch and keep reading, a writer to cherish."
-- Peter Straub

"One has to write with considerable authenticity to pull off a story steeped in magic and swamp water that examines race and class, death and rebirth, Haitian voodoo, and the beginnings of jazz in 1891 New Orleans... The plot is complex and magical, grounded in the history of the city, without being overly sentimental. There is a comfort with death as a part of life in this work that reveals deep feeling for the city and its past. Of course, every novel about New Orleans must have a good hurricane. Like the one in Zora Neale Hurston's classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, this hurricane destroys the city while making hope possible. Highly recommended for all fiction collections, especially where there is an interest in jazz."
-- Library Journal

"The Sound of Building Coffins is set in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, where, explains Maistros, residents have 'a long and curious relationship with death, a closeness, a delicate truce.' In spite of all of the death and violence and betrayal, Coffins is also filled with love. Love moves characters to commit terrible acts, but it also drives them to right their wrongs. Love offers second chances, sometimes in this life and sometimes in the one beyond."
-- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since A Confederacy of Dunces has done such justice to New Orleans."
-- Donald Harington, winner of the Robert Penn Warren Award

"The Sound of Building Coffins is easily one of the finest and truest pieces of New Orleans fiction I've ever read."
-- Poppy Z. Brite

"This book sings out in true jazz fashion -- wildly inventive, oddly formed yet perfectly made, and never a sour note."
-- The Anniston Star

"A writer of lesser ability would have been swallowed up in the swirling complexity of such a plot, plunging it to the level of a silly period piece regional novel. However, The Sound of Building Coffins is different. Maistros keeps his head above water and pulls off an admirable story because of his keen research into the history of New Orleans and his compelling style that is fired by his use of foreboding imagery. Readers can never guess what is coming next as the various threads are revealed and followed. The story, although complex, rings true because of its meticulous backdrop and immediate reader sympathy with the Morningstar family.

"Maistros' story is not a fantasy tale. It is about life and the timeless theme of how people integrate living with the good and the bad around them and how they can emerge with newness as a result. The Sound of Building Coffins is riveting. It is a good read and a remarkable first novel."
-- Endtype: A Canadian Literary Magazine

"If Maistros was a traditional storyteller rather than a writer, he would be one of those gifted individuals that you would listen to raptly, late into the night."
-- The Roanoke Times

"Maistros's novel is a painstakingly authentic depiction of New Orleans at the birth of the Jazz Age, and also a myth of the birth of Jazz itself. Describing the sprawling plot in a review would be like describing New Orleans in a sentence: difficult and probably inadequate. I like Maistros's New Orleans. I like its spaces and its dirt and its sounds. The city teeters on the precipice of natural and supernatural disaster alike, but it never turns into a landscape where good and evil battle for possession, rather, it operates like a dance floor, where the two circle each other, where good is not completely good, and evil not entirely irredeemable, and sometimes the two become indistinguishable."
-- The Front Table: The Web Magazine of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago

"One of the best New Orleans novels I've ever read, Louis Maistros' debut seems dictated in a fever dream of automatic writing."
-- Patrick Millikin, The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, AZ

More information, reviews and excerpts from The Sound of Building Coffins can be found at the author's website, LouisMaistros.Com

The condition of the book is pristine, brand new, never-been-read.

All of our autographed items are 100% guaranteed authentic for life. Comes with Certificate of Authenticity upon request.

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