"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
From "Migration of the Love Bugs" by Jill McCorkle:
My husband and I live in a tin can. He calls it the streamline model, the top of the line, the cream of the crop when it comes to moveable homes. Ambulatory and proud of it. That's Frank's motto and I guess it makes sense in a way, since he is the only one of six siblings who's still alive and walking, not to even mention that he spent his whole adult life setting things in concrete--house foundations and driveways, sidewalks that will remain until the New England winters crack them once too often and that new cement outfit that just opened comes in to redo the job.
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 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.
Susan Hubbard is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and the author of two collections of short fiction: Blue Money (1999) and Walking on Ice (1990).
Robley Wilson, professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, has been editor of the North American Review since 1969. He has published a novel, four books of short fiction, and three books of poetry, including Everything Paid For (UPF, 1999).
Contributors
Frederick Barthelme
Tom Chiarella
Philip Cioffari
Steve Cushman
John Henry Fleming
Aracelis Gonzalez Asendorf
Jeffrey Greene
William R. Kanouse
Karen Loeb
Alison Lurie
Wendell Mayo
Jill McCorkle
Peter Meinke
Patrick J. Murphy
Louis Phillips
Elisavietta Ritchie
Enid Shomer
William Snyder, Jr.
Abraham Verghese
Steve Watkins
Joy Williams
