About

The second season of the Florida Book Club podcast will launch in March 2021. In each episode, myself and occasional assorted guests will focus on the forgotten, undervalued, underrated, misrepresented, and just plain weird literature, film, media, music, and assorted pop cultural relics of the sunshine state. So if you saw book club in the title and were instantly turned off, don’t be. We’ll take frequent detours into other media. That no-budget eco-horror movie you saw it when you were a kid? Some obscure death metal album recorded in Tampa in the late 1980s? Old Florida ruins inhabited by shadow people? Yeah, we’ll likely get into that sort of stuff, too.

Of course, we’ll also dig into the literary history of the state. Does Florida have a literary canon? If so, does a 1970s pulp novel about a giant alligator belong in it? Is it too soon to put Colson Whitehead’s “Nickel Boys” in the Florida canon? Is there a definitive Florida novel, story, or poem, and so on?

We’ll probably talk about more mainstream and historically renowned Florida artists and writers, too, from time to time. But really, Carl Hiaasen and Lauren Groff and Kristen Arnett don’t need the likes of me to hype them, do they? And I probably can’t add much to the legacies of writers like Zora Neale Hurston. That doesn’t mean they won’t get any airtime. So join me and these potential various guests for some intellectually stimulating and entertaining discussions. Hopefully you’ll come out of it with a new reading list and an appreciation for Florida’s wildly diverse artistic and cultural heritage.