by Alison Lurie
First published 2000
This anthology gathers twenty-one contemporary writers who transform Florida from mere setting into living character. The collection features established voices like Frederick Barthelme, Joy Williams, and Peter Meinke alongside emerging talents. In Jill McCorkle's "Migration of the Love Bugs," a retired cement worker and his wife settle their trailer on cinder blocks in swampy Florida terrain, where she questions whether this promised land delivers on its promises. The stories span Florida's geography from the Panhandle to Key West, revealing a state that shifts between paradise and nightmare. Writers present Florida as sinister landscape thick with alligators and creeping vegetation, as surreal expanse of theme parks and strip malls, and as natural sanctuary of sea and hammock. The editors Susan Hubbard and Robley Wilson sifted through over six hundred stories to select the finest Florida fiction from the century's final decades. Each story uses Florida's distinctive atmosphere to drive narrative forward, making place inseparable from character and plot.
Genres: fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: ensemble-cast, setting-as-character
Setting: Florida, Key West, Panhandle
Period: 21st Century
232 pages · Paperback · University Press of Florida