Red Robichaux and Other Southern Moralists

Description

Daniel Fitzpatrick

Red Robichaux and Other Southern Moralists

ISBN: 978-1-956921-72-4 (pbk.)

(April 15, 2026) 

Red Robichaux and Other Southern Moralists ranges from the streets of Italy to the woods of Arkansas but always returns to the Crescent City. Arranged loosely around the story of Janelle Moats—her long life in New Orleans, her encounters with art, and her experience of human nature—these tales find their characters in a world that is both beautiful and violent. Echoing Tennessee Williams and James Joyce, Eudora Welty and Dante, Daniel Fitzpatrick’s debut collection of short fiction bears witness to the mystery of the human heart and to the suffering that looks through death.

Praise for Daniel Fitzpatrick and Red Robichaux and Other Southern Moralists

Danny Fitzpatrick’s Red Robichaux and Other Southern Moralists contains multitudes: a vast array of characters grappling with faith and making meaning of their lives.  It is a pleasure to witness their tender care toward one another as they find themselves in the landscapes and journeys taken across the South and beyond.

—Brooke Champagne, author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy.

Danny Fitzpatrick is one of the treasures of the New Orleans literary scene, not only for his beautiful words, but because he hasn’t given up hope that stories can make us more compassionate people.  The title, Red Robichaux and Other Southern Moralists, is apt because Fitzpatrick is concerned with morals; he takes our desires and peccadillos seriously–our smallest thoughts and gestures are rife with meaning–and yet his stories shine with humor and mercy. These are stories that are not here to play or pretend. The stories in this collection are some of his best and each one beats with a magnificent heart.

—Justin Lacour, author of A Reading from the Book of Panic

Danny Fitzpatrick writes with the eye of a poet and the voice of New Orleans early in the morning, breathy and potent with meaning. To read his work is to enter not merely a story, but also a state of soul, one in which every detail carries a pressing weight of human dignity.  No southern Catholic writer can write without being compared to Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, and those echoes are certainly here, along with hints of Faulkner and Welty. But Mr. Fitzpatrick has a confident voice that stands in partnership with them, not imitation. To that chorus he adds a fundamental humaneness sorely lacking in the contemporary literary landscape. Those interested in Catholic fiction, Southern fiction, or simple humanity will find a rare delight in this collection. 

—Fr. Clinton Sensat

Readers will be transported by the hypnotic, enchanting music of these stories and the rich, lush atmosphere that provides at once their substrate and the source of their sense. For their atmosphere is not only the rich blend of Louisiana Gulf Coast culture; their atmosphere is grace. As works of art, they are outrageously good, many anthology-worthy, some canon-worthy. As works of the spirit, they must have been pure gift.

—Katy Carl, author of Fragile Objects

A wonderful collection. All dimensions of the human experience are here–friendship, betrayal, frailty, faith, humor…woven together in a beautiful, meditative tapestry.

—Michael Strecker, author of The Knights of Wade

Daniel Fitzpatrick being a member of that true breed of moral writers, the irony of the title of his short-story collection Red Robichaux and Other Southern Moralists is not lost on the reader. In the tradition of Eudora Welty, he too casts a wide net, his gathering of characters of every kind reflecting the muddy and bucolic waters of the New Orleans area; the unpredictable Gulf Coast; a Hot Springs that is not exactly healing. Your soul becalmed by Fitzpatrick’s intelligent poetic prose, his wicked humor leaves you spluttering in its wake. The final story bringing together recurring characters and themes compels the reader to recross the bridges of the collection’s beginning. We need more Southern moralists.

—Teresa Tumminello Brader, author of Letting in Air and Light and Secret Keepers: Stories

The characters in these stories are no more in control of their destinies than we are. They cannot make sense of their fears or burdens, but are forced to choose their paths nevertheless, navigating a world Fitzpatrick strews with joys and dangers too large and numinous to comprehend. These are stories not only to entertain but to remind us how glorious life is, in all its mystery.”

—Daniel Cowper, author of Kingdom of the Clock

Provocatively subtitled And Other Southern Moralists, Daniel Fitzpatrick’s Red Robichaux invites the reader into the moral murk of a world whose natural microcosm—though they range as far afield as Tuscany—is New Orleans. In these fifteen stories, protagonists grapple with threats from without and within. Ordinary happiness falls short of the vision of heaven. Parents, children, husbands, wives, lovers, friends, and enemies all fail to love each other. The natural world, by turns mysterious and predatory, flickers at the perimeters of this fallen City of God like phosphorous on brackish water. Fitzpatrick’s New Orleans is a universe of sin and strangeness, miracle and terror, and its inhabitants are people you probably know.

—Sally Thomas, author of The Blackbird and Other Stories

Danny Fitzpatrick’s stories are a heartfelt vision of a long-ago Catholicism and children who inhabited its meaningful world.

—Tim Gautreaux, author of Same Place, Same Things