It used to be commonplace to say that Florida was fragmented: part South (in the north), part Northeast (in the south), part Native America, part Latin America, part Disney. I think this is less true since the hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, when storms blew across our imaginary borders, crisscrossed our state’s evacuation destination, Orlando, made mock of attempts to isolate our citrus canker (yes, I’m still mad that the Dept. of Ag. cut down my healthy lime tree!), showed us our mutual danger and swamped us all in impossible insurance rates.
    We’re all in this together: We share the wind, the ocean, the power of nature and the fantasy of glass towers, our booms and busts, our crime, our politics, our scoundrels and heros, our worries and our amusements. We’re a peninsula seemingly apart from the rest of the country, and yet we’re often at the center of its attention. Rare is the story without some Florida angle, it seems. When you heard about Anna Nicole Smith, I bet you said, it had to happen in Florida. A death at the Seminole Hardrock Casino, just down the road from tabloid headquarters, with the Broward sheriff guarding the morgue, at an intersection of Hollywood and the Bahamas: the event had our territorial complexity and our propensity for stories with abundant plot lines and characters both sad and grotesque.
    I’m only beginning to realize the hunger of readers to understand this place. When I was doing readings around South Florida this winter as one of the contributors to Miami Noir , everywhere we went I heard the eagerness of questions from audiences: Is there something about Hialeah in there? How about some ghost stories like the ones my grandmother told me about St. Augustine? The rapidity of our development is also the high-speed obliteration of our past, and many people expressed their wish that stories be written before they are forgotten. And lots are being written. Florida books come out in abundance, but nowhere that I know of is the picture they form being put together. Our trash and pleasure, our serious concerns about nature and politics, all infuse our fiction and nonfiction, the work of our crowds of crime writers and clusters of poets. Shouldn’t they be read in the context of the rich history of Florida literature, of Ernest Hemingway and Elizabeth Bishop, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Zora Neale Hurston, John James Audubon and John D. Macdonald and so many more?
    So I said, “There ought to be a website for reviews and discussion of Florida books,” and Susan Parsons challenged me to create one with her, and: here we are.
    Our first reviews of course just begin to show what we have in mind, but I’m pleased to say that we at least touch on some of the range of Florida history and genres. We look at books about Florida’s First People and the heyday of Miami Beach and I had the pleasure of reading Bill Belleville’s Losing It All to Sprawl which documents our present losses and future danger. We review new fiction by Chantel Acevedo and Harry Crews and Karen Russell and Ginny Rorby’s young adult novel which has been garnering national awards. We offer a reconsideration of Russell Banks’ Continental Drift twenty years after and an interview with poet Michael Hettich. We’ve posted some links to the bookstores, presses, magazines, and writers’ organizations around the state and hope you’ll let us know about more we can include.
    New material is being added all the time and I’ll be writing here regularly to talk about the many seasons of our year and things to read to get you through them.
    Please enjoy what’s here, sign up for our mailing list, link to us, and while you read, think about what Florida is.
    —Lynne Barrett