Last One Out Shut Off the Lights — Stephanie Soileau

A debut story collection from a rising star, revealing Louisiana and its characters with stark honesty and empathy as they grapple with homesickness, desperation, and desire.

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights is a vivid portrait of the last-chance towns of southwest Louisiana, where oil development, industrial pollution, dying wetlands, and the ever-present threat of devastating hurricanes have eroded their inhabitants' sense of home. These stories feature characters struggling to find a foothold in a world that is forever washing out from under them, people who must reckon with their ambivalence about belonging to a place so continually in flux.

An overwhelmed teenage mother leaves her infant son in a closet to buy herself a night out; a teacher with a terminally ill husband fantasizes about another man; a retiree surveys the devastation left by a hurricane and decides the fate of a lost cat; and a young woman out of options tries to drag her brother to Mexico for surgery, desperate to save his life and her own.

As Lauren Groff did for the state of Florida in her recent collection Florida, Stephanie Soileau demonstrates that Louisiana is as much a state of mind as it is a place on the map. Her fiction is a powerful reminder of the rich variety of Southern culture, and brings back into focus the Cajun language, life rhythms, and customs that still make Louisiana so unique.