Cory MacLauchlin is on a tour of New Orleans that includes meetings everywhere but under the Woolworth's clock. Over the weekend, he answered questions after a screening of a documentary about John Kennedy Toole. Early this week, the Confederacy of Dunces author's most recent biographer will get the floor to himself with two apperances scheduled to talk about his book, Butterfly in the Typewriter.

New Orleans native Dawn DeDeaux is staging an intervention to fight the dark ages of our times, and The Goddess Fortuna and Her Dunces, In an Effort to Make Sense of It All - a multimedia project inspired by John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces is the mandate to spread joyous enlightenment throughout the swamp and great continental wilderness beyond.

While the crisis at Le Petit Theatre has raged, another storied French Quarter landmark has also been having a hard spin of the financial wheel of luck. We know Canal Street's Chateau Bourbon as the hotel with the statue of Ignatius J. Reilly out front, and the clock on the front under which A Confederacy of Dunces begins. But the storied suite house, which opened as DH Holmes Dept. Store in 1849, was in a jam, until today.

Either a speed reader or a person of conscience, the thief who swiped first editions from Maple Street Book Shop last week apparently brought the books back. An employee of the Uptown store who often rescues stray cats was trying to corral one such feline Sunday morning. The cat ran into an abandoned vehicle in the backyard of the house next door, where the employee found the books said manager Gladin Scott.