100% Pure Florida Fiction
Edited by Susan Hubbard and Robley Wilson

This anthology of modern Florida fiction showcases the work of 21 writers, including such literary lights as Frederick Barthelme, Alison Lurie, Jill McCorkle, Peter Meinke, and Joy Williams, as well as that of new and emerging writers. Sifting through over 600 stories in books, magazines, literary journals, and the internet, the editors selected the best Florida fiction of the century’s last decades.
What these stories have in common, of course, is a Florida setting--but a Florida so strongly evoked that it is more character than place. In these stories Florida is sinister, full of alligators, creeping plants, heavy clouds, noir cops and con artists; it is the surreal spread of theme parks, condominiums, and strip malls; and it is a paradise--lost, regained, and remembered--of sea, sun, hammock, forest, and glade.
100% Pure Florida Fiction is the perfect literary companion for Florida travels, armchair and actual, from the Panhandle to Key West and a dozen places in between. And it is proof that Florida is the stuff good stories are made of.
 

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The Creek
by J. T. GLISSON (Author)

"I had met only two or three of the neighboring Crackers when I realized that isolation had done something to these people. [three dots] They have a primal quality against their background of jungle hammock, moss-hung against the tremendous silence of the scrub country. The only ingredients of their lives are the elemental things."--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, March 1930, in a letter to Alfred S. Dashiell of Scribner's Magazine
Except for one extended black family and "one writer from up north," folks from Cross Creek were ornery, independent Crackers, J. T. Glisson writes in this memoir of growing up in the backwoods of north-central Florida. The time spanned the late twenties to the early fifties, and isolation and an abundance of mosquitoes and snakes were their claim to fame. The writer was Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

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Florida Poems
by Campbell Mcgrath (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Exuberant description meets political protest and amateur natural history in this fifth volume from MacArthur grant winner McGrath (Road Atlas), whose new poems speak to his adopted state's ills and illusions. The very readable opening sequence adapts Aristophanes to tell the story of a city luxurious, based on tourism, deeply divided that flourishes, then founders, in the clouds: as McGrath's poem unfolds, his cloud metropolis comes to resemble first the United States, then Florida, complete with rampant hedonism, alligators and struggling immigrants. Awe and resentment alternate throughout short poems in the middle of the volume, which view specific locales: a long-lined lyric evokes "jasmine, egret in moonlight, trade wind through the jacaranda," while a comical villanelle explores "the annual State Fair, a very weird place." More discursive poems tag along with an early explorer or visit McGrath's wrath on Orlando, "city with the character of a turnpike restroom." Last, best and longest, "The Florida Poem" takes readers on a vatic tour of the whole state, through "technocrats and mousketeer apparatchiks" to "indigenous culture ripped from the walls/ by the wind of European arrival." Though some passages sound clunky or rushed, McGrath's gregarious phraseologies and expandable forms (one based on the alphabet, another on journals) suit his odd blend of comedy and jeremiad. Readers who take special pleasure in Billy Collins or in Florida itself will find McGrath's book something to remember. (Feb.)Forecast: Topical and colloquial enough to garner review attention, this book should also generate profiles in glossies and seems an NPR natural,, given McGrath's solid mid-career stage. The volume's theme seems guaranteed to snag home-state media: look for regional interest, and perhaps even (given the dis of Disney) some controversy.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 

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Florida Stories
by Kevin McCarthy (Editor)

Like an album of snapshots from a tropical vacation, this collection of seventeen stories captures Florida places and characters transformed by the literary imagination of some of America’s finest short fiction writers: Stephen Crane,

The stories range widely across Florida history and landscapes—St. Petersburg in the 20s, Key West and Alachua County in the 30s, Coconut Grove and Jacksonville in the 50s, Miami Beach in the 60s, and Ft. Lauderdale in the 70s. Andrew Lytle recounts violent events in an Indian village during the Spanish rule. Sarah Orne Jewett and Stephen Crane treat maritime Florida in the 19th century while Hemingway and Philip Wylie present stories of the 20th century. From the pinewoods of northern Florida, through cracker farms, boom towns, and coastal suburbs, to the swamps and the Keys, we meet characters both common and extraordinary: moonshiners, socialites, carnies, sailors, scavengers, and fugitives.
 

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Journal of Light
The Visual Diary of a Florida Nature Photographer
by John Moran (Author)

Orlando Weekly, December 2, 2004
Moran captures...our state's rapidly evaporating natural beauty in a way that's inspiring.

St. Petersburg Times, February 13, 2004
Journal of Light is an unusual look at Florida--unusual and refreshingly honest.

Charleston Post and Courier, March 13, 2005
...a vivid billet-doux to [Moran's] adopted home, reminding us of what survives the onslaught, at least for now...

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River of Lakes
A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River
By Bill Belleville

Eighteen of Florida’s best-loved writers here share with you their affection for Florida’s wild side--the beautiful heart of a state under siege from development. Carl Hiaasen, Randy Wayne White, Al Burt, Patrick Smith, the late Archie Carr, and others evoke a Florida thick with pinewoods, alligators, and palmetto scrub; ribboned by miles of coast and dune; blessed with backcountry lakes, rivers, creeks, and springs. Strip malls and concrete cannot tame this wild Florida, but they can kill it. These essays offer passionate argument why that should not be allowed to happen.

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Shades of Green
Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860
by Ian Frederick Finseth (Author)

Review
"Finseth's attention to the convergence of antebellum views of slavery and rising appreciation of the sociopolitical import of the natural world (what we have come nowadays to call 'ecocriticism') provides a unique and welcome new departure in the study of slavery and abolitionism." --Eric J. Sundquist, author of Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865

"This is a rich and insightful study that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of debates on slavery and race, particularly in relation to historically shifting conceptions of 'nature' and the human." --Robert S. Levine, associate general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature

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The Wild Heart of Florida
Florida Writers on Florida's Wildlands
Edited by Jeff Ripple and Susan Cerulean

Eighteen of Florida’s best-loved writers here share with you their affection for Florida’s wild side--the beautiful heart of a state under siege from development. Carl Hiaasen, Randy Wayne White, Al Burt, Patrick Smith, the late Archie Carr, and others evoke a Florida thick with pinewoods, alligators, and palmetto scrub; ribboned by miles of coast and dune; blessed with backcountry lakes, rivers, creeks, and springs. Strip malls and concrete cannot tame this wild Florida, but they can kill it. These essays offer passionate argument why that should not be allowed to happen.

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