Gambit readers know Ian McNulty as a cuisine guy from his weekly look at New Orleans restaurants, but his new book, A Season of Night: New Orleans Life After Katrina is more than that. A look at coming home after the storm, with a special focus on Mid-City, Season of Night has earned advance praise from the likes of Ace Atkins and John Biguenet (see A&E editor Will Coviello’s take in this week’s paper).

McNulty signs A Season of Night at 5:30 p.m. Thu., July 10 at the Garden District Book Shop (2727 Prytania St.), and at 2 p.m. Sun., July 13 at Finn McCool’s Irish Pub (3701 Banks St.).

Q: There’ve been lots of Katrina-tinged memoirs. How is yours different? What do you bring to the tapestry of our storm stories?

A: The books I’ve seen so far have been histories of the disaster or individual tales of living through the storm and all the chaos it brought. But “A Season of Night” is about homecoming. It’s about the decision to return to a city that, at the time, was utterly broken. My book is a very intimate account of what it meant to move back at that time and live in a place that was unspeakably creepy, depressing, infuriating but oddly joyful and energizing all at once.

Many of the literary agents I contacted early on dismissed the project for the very reason you mention. It seemed like the memo had gone around that there were too many Katrina books in the pipeline already. So I’m very grateful that my publisher took a closer look at my manuscript and decided it was indeed different.

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Cynthia Owen, a longtime star of the New Orleans stage, died Sunday in Las Vegas. She was 44.

Owen spent her life in the theater, starting from an early age working in children’s theater. Equally talented as a singer and actress, she played starring roles such as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, Charity Hope Valentine (pictured 2004) in Sweet Charity and Eva Peron in Evita. She was to appear in Pal Joey recently at Tulane Summer Lyric Theater but was unable to do so due to illness.

Owen was beloved by local audiences and the theater community. Over the years, she performed in dramas and musicals across the city. She won four Big Easy Entertainment Awards, three times for best actress in a musical – Sweet Charity (1993), Funny Girl (1994) and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (2000). She won best supporting actress in 1996 for her role in Oliver.

Owen is survived by her mother Lyla Hay Owen, her husband Jim Holmes and her sister.

After the public uproar that erupted in Terrebonne Parish when a school valedictorian spoke a sentence of her commencement speech in Vietnamese, the Terrebonne Parish School Board is now considering a policy, which would require that English only be spoken at high school graduations.  The board will also look at requiring school prayer at graduations.

Enter the Dragon; or, in this case, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.

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Two candidates named Carter will run for Congress against Bill Jefferson — again — this season, but this time one of them is not Rep. Karen Carter Peterson. Sources say that current District C City Councilman James Carter as well as former District C Councilman Troy Carter both will announce soon. James Carter’s announcement will come out any minute now, in fact.

This adds several strange new twists to the campaign.

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