Tucked into an unassuming storefront along Pirate’s Alley in New Orleans’s French Quarter is Faulkner House Books, a small, charming shop that has more than once found itself listed among the country’s best bookstores. It is a distinction that is well deserved.

Stepping into the space, customers are greeted with beautiful, tall shelves lined with fiction, non-fiction, local interest, and classics, among other genres. A few smaller displays pepper the tight but not cramped-feeling space, and a center table includes featured titles, as well as those by the store’s namesake, William Faulkner.

Opened in 1990 by attorney Joseph J. DeSalvo, Jr., Faulkner House Books is so named because the author rented rooms on the ground floor of the building in 1925. Long before penning such classics as As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury and becoming a Nobel Prize laureate, Faulkner completed his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, inside what is now the bookstore.

While the Faulkner mystique may well draw in visitors (the place has even been said to be haunted by the author), the finely selected and artfully displayed collection of mostly new – with some vintage – books guarantees that visitors will find something that speaks to their interests, from literary fiction to New Orleans history to the many works of Faulkner.

Faulkner House Books is open daily and is located at 625 Pirate’s Alley, New Orleans, Louisiana. 

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