Snippets are fragments of things. They are people observed, foods consumed, ornaments spotted: a man on a streetcar, crawfish shells on the sidewalk, an ornate cornstalk-shaped fence.

This book is my most earnest and honest reflection of New Orleans: triumphant and tragic, gaudy and gritty, elegant and ugly, rich and poor, a city that embodies all these and other polar opposites with a perverse kind of grace. My account is flawed and incomplete in the way all our experiences are flawed and incomplete: there are always vistas left to see, flavors left to try, stories left to hear; there are assumptions made, words misunderstood, histories distorted.

May this book communicate the New Orleans I know, and may you weave your own New Orleans truth between the pages.

- Emma Fick