“Betcha I can tell ya / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Betchadollar, / Betchadollar, / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Got your shoes on your feet, / Got your feet on the street, / And the street’s in Noo / Awlins, Loo- / Eez-ee-anna. Where I, for my part, first ate a live oyster and first saw a naked woman with the lights on. . . . Every time I go to New Orleans I am startled by something.”

So writes Roy Blount Jr. in this exuberant, character-filled saunter through a place he has loved almost his entire life—a city “like no other place in America, and yet (or therefore) the cradle of American culture.” Here we experience it all through his eyes, ears, and taste buds: the architecture, music, romance (yes, sex too), historical characters, and all that glorious food.

The book is divided into eight Rambles through different parts of the city. Each closes with lagniappe—a little bit extra, a special treat for the reader: here a brief riff on Gennifer Flowers, there a meditation on naked dancing. Roy Blount knows New Orleans like the inside of an oyster shell and is only too glad to take us to both the famous and the infamous sights. He captures all the wonderful and rich history—culinary, literary, and political—of a city that figured prominently in the lives of Jefferson Davis (who died there), Truman Capote (who was conceived there), Zora Neale Hurston (who studied voodoo there), and countless others, including Andrew Jackson, Lee Harvey Oswald, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Jelly Roll Morton, Napoléon, Walt Whitman, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Earl Long, Randy Newman, Edgar Degas, Lillian Hellman, the Boswell Sisters, and the Dixie Cups.

Above all, though, Feet on the Street is a celebration of friendship and joie de vivre in one of America’s greatest and most colorful cities, written by one of America’s most beloved humorists.

Also available as a Random House AudioBook

"In this brief walking tour of New Orleans, Blount (Robert E. Lee; Be Sweet) spins an atmospheric, pleasantly meandering tale about a city he clearly knows and loves. Rather than offer up the standard guidebook-style list of things for tourists to do, Blount divides the book into eight 'rambles,' because 'New Orleans is my favorite place in the world to ramble. Even on those deep-summer days that make a person feel swathed in slowly melting hamfat.' Blount's yarns will make readers want to visit the city, soak up the mood and create their own memories. Even something as simple as a rain shower reads like a possible adventure: 'It can rain so hard in New Orleans that you expect to see alligators bouncing off the pavement ... Also dramatic in their way are the soft showers of the early evening, sometimes arriving spookily in full sunshine from no clouds at all.' Of course, even the most unconventional guide to the Big Easy would be incomplete without a mention of the city's food, and Blount devotes an entire ramble to raw oysters, which he says 'give you a coolish inner lining collateral to the sheen that New Orleans humidity gives your skin.' Blount's New Orleans isn't sugar-coated; it's at times wistful, melancholy and even dangerous. But all this combines to give the reader the impression that anything can happen in New Orleans, which is precisely the author's point. Those looking for a nontraditional portrait of this unconventional city will be delighted by Blount's colorful, almost tender account." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A man who knows New Orleans like the back of his hand is only too glad to take visitors to both the famous and infamous sights. He sprinkles his walk with the history, literature, and lore of New Orleans of which there is plenty.

"New Orleans has figured prominently in the lives of Andy Jackson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Jelly Roll Morton, Napoleon, Walt Whitman, O Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Earl Long, Randy Newman, Degas, Lilian Hellman, the Boswell Sisters, the Dixie Cups, and Roy's scandalous ancestor William Blount, to name a few. Zora Neale Hurston studied voodoo there (as Roy has, sort of), Abraham Lincoln was shocked by the slave markets there (don't get Roy started on the history of those markets), Truman Capote was conceived there (in the Hotel Monteleone), and Jefferson Davis died there. And it was there that Roy first saw a naked woman whom he didn't know, and also where he realized that a man whom he'd thought of as his first literary friend wanted to have sex with him. All that history--multicultural and personal--is palpably, visibly, smellably there to be walked around in, and Roy Blount Jr. brings it all to us in dollopfulls. Roy knows New Orleans like the back of his hand and is only too glad to take us to both the famous and infamous sights. He sprinkles his walk with the history, literature, and lore of New Orleans of which there is plenty. And what would a trip to New Orleans be without tasting its culinary delights and eccentricities! Roy takes us from grocery stores that sell canned baby Conch, quail eggs, and Poulpe al Huile (octopus in oil) to a fine restaurant where one waiter slaps another with a napkin as if challenging him to a duel. Roy invites us to drink chicory coffee and eat beignets, listen to a street musician and horses clopping over cobblestones and a steamboat calliope going by, while reading the world's greatest obituary pages in the Times-Picayune. And, heinforms us, there's no better way to end--or start!--a walk of the city than stopping in at Napoleans and sampling the best Sazarac in the world. However it begins or ends, a trip to this great city with Roy Blount Jr. is a thing to behold.

Roy Blunt, Jr. has written many books, including the memoir Be Sweet and the novel First Hubby. He appears regularly on NPR’s Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me and is a contributor to many national publications. He lives in Manhattan and western Massachusetts.