100% Pure Florida Fiction
From "Migration of the Love Bugs" by Jill McCorkle:
We're in Florida now and the only concrete we own are the cinder blocks that keep our wheels from turning. "Can't we at least put our tin can up on a foundation like everybody else's?" I asked our first day here. "You know, pretend it's a real building rather than a souped-up vehicle?" He was in what he called his retirement clothes, pastel golfwear, though he has never touched a club. He was surveying the flat, swampy, treeless land as if this was the Exodus. Even that day, our belongings not even unpacked, I was thinking that if this was the Promised Land, Moses for sure dealt me a bad hand.
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-men; 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. 2000. 232pp. 6 X 9. 0-8130-1752-1 Cloth, $59.95 0-8130-1753-X Paper, $16.95
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"A fictional map of the state from Barthelme's "Larroquette" set in the dusty Panhandle to "The Pool People" in which Alison Lurie takes us to a steamy Key West."
-- St. Petersburg Times "The stories themselves are superb, having been culled form more than 600 published in literary magazines, books and journals. They paint a disturbing picture of contemporary Florida."
-- Miami Herald "A fascinating snapshot of Sunshine State literature at century's end."
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"Brighter than a digital print-out, 100% Pure Florida Fiction provides a full-featured map of Florida’s imaginative landscape at the stark turning of the millennial moment--with visions and aftershocks that linger in the mind long after reading."--Joe David Bellamy, former publisher and editor, Fiction International
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