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 Recommended ReadingBeyond Paradise: More Fiction from the Florida Keys - The Florida Keys: A History of the Pioneers, John Viele - Key West Tales, John Hersey - Tales from Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffett
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 Beyond
Paradise: More New Fiction from the Florida Keys, Key West Authors’ Coop, 1999
“Have you
always harbored a sneaking suspicion that beautiful, laid back Key West
just might have a seamier side? Let the down-and-outs, the
old folks, the young hustlers, the Cuban refugees and the rest of the
characters take you Beyond Paradise and find out what a struggle living
in a tropical dreamland can be. Take, for instance, Molly
and her friends, who will do anything for a cheap string of plastic
beads; or King, who finds that one seemingly harmless breakfast toot
can change the course of a man’s life.
“For the memorable characters
of Beyond Paradise, money is always short but indulgences are aplenty,
whether they be sunshine, liquor, cheap sex or a pleasure as simple as
casting a line into the brilliant blue sea and hooking the big one.
Many of the same writers
published in the KWAC’s first collection, Once Upon an Island, return
to delight their fans with more stories of life on the southernmost
island in the continental United States. Whether you are
looking for an afternoon’s escape in the hammock under a palm tree, to
take a literary taste of Key West back home with you or simply to enjoy
good fiction, Beyond Paradise is guaranteed to satisfy.”
The Florida Keys: A History of the Pioneers, John Viele, Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 1996
“Today on the Keys
between Key West and the mainland, some forty thousand residents and
thousands of visitors fish, sail, and dive in the crystal clear waters
off a tropical reef; relax in the sun and cooling trade wind breezes;
and sleep in the air-conditioned comfort of their homes and hotel rooms.
“On these same islands, as
short a time as eighty years ago, fewer than three hundred inhabitants
tried to eke out a living without benefit of electricity, running
water, radios, or telephones. Tormented by clouds of
voracious mosquitoes and no-see-ums, broiled by the tropical sun, they
lived in thatched-roof homes regularly flattened by hurricane
winds. Weeks would go by before some passing sailboat
brought them news of the outside world or their
relatives. The stories of these hardy pioneers and their
predecessors, as far back as the Native Americans who lived on the Keys
at least one thousand years ago, are told, many for the first time, in
this book.
“Using old newspapers,
letters, diaries, and government records, as well as interviews with
old-timer natives of the Keys, the author has brought to life the
trials and successes of Keys pioneers as they struggled to build a life
for themselves and their loved ones in an often harsh
environment. From the earliest Keys inhabitants—who
plundered wrecks on the reef and either murdered or rescued the
survivors according to whether they were English or Spanish—to the
early-twentieth-century land owner who build a tower in an attempt to
lure mosquito-eating bats, inhabitants of the Keys have coped with
nature and other human beings as best they could. Their
occupations have included such diverse ventures as salvaging wrecks,
growing sponges, planting pineapples, making charcoal, and skinning
sharks.
“The author has written an
affectionate and respectful account of the early life of one of
Florida’s most treasured areas.”
Key West Tales, John Hersey, New York: Vintage Books, 1996
“In his last work of
fiction, one of our most important writers trained his eye on a place
he knew fondly and without illusion: the biologically lush and socially
outrageous landscape of Key West. There, amid
bright-blooming greenery and bars named La Te Da and Sloppy Joe’s, John
Hersey’s characters seek fortunes, fight for glory, and cruise for love
in all its varieties.
“Only in Key West Tales will
you find a fiery preacher whose primary, unholy occupation creeps into
his Sunday sermon; a man with AIDS locked in a deathbed battle of wills
with his sweetly tyrannical nurse; an aging Papa Hemingway, slugging it
out with the tourists; and a young man who proposes to meet his
long-lost ‘blood mother’ during the bacchanal of Fantasy Fest—with both
of them in disguise. Lively, poignant, and written with
Hersey’s trademark psychological acuity and stylistic verve, these
fifteen stories are the splendid finale to a splendid writing career.”
Tales from Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffett, New York: Fawcett Crest, 1993
“Just where is
Margaritaville, anyway? It’s not on a map, that’s for
sure. But it does exist, in the brilliantly creative
imagination of singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett. Tales from
Margaritaville is a collection so vividly packed with restless
dreamers, wild wanderers, and pure gypsy souls that just reading it is
an adventure itself.
“From the travels that take a cowboy named Tully Mars from Heartache,
Wyoming, to Graceland, to the colorful crazies of Heatwave, Alabama, to
the autobiographical adventures of a third-generation sailor and
first-rate musical outlaw, these stories present the true roamer’s twin
loves—the sea and the road—in a way you’ll never forget.”
“God, I love South
Florida,” Jimmy Buffett writes in Tales from
Margaritaville. “Another typical day. I put my
Falcon Sprint convertible in gear and made an end run through the big
tomato field on the left side of the highway. The army of
police was too busy chasing snakes and confining people to their cars
to notice me.
“I dodged two big rattlers
who looked like they could puncture my tires. Then I bounced
through rows of little green tomatoes and drove up onto the old Card
Sound Road.
“Card Sound Road is the back
door to the Florida Keys, a straight line going south. It is
a two-lane blacktop lined on each side by a stand of Norfolk pines, a
road on which speed limits are made to be broken. It ends as
abruptly as it begins, leading to U.S. 1 near Key Largo, the territory
of Travis McGee and Humphrey Bogart. I was going all the way
to the end in Key West where I would catch the ferryboat to
Margaritaville and celebrate my return from Nashville.
“When I passed the first
hand-painted sign that read ‘Blue Crabs for Sale,’ I knew I was close
to Alabama Jack’s. It was an old watering hole with some
kind of magic attached to it. I could always find a little
peace of mind there, sitting at one of the wooden picnic tables
overlooking the water. I had definitely reached a crossroad.”
There is something that is shared by all these books. They
all treat the Florida Keys less as a setting or location and more as a
feeling or state of mind. The Keys are the end-point of the
United States. There are, of course, similar locations to be
found in the country—Provincetown, Cape Hatteras, Bar Harbor, Catalina,
South Padre Island—places that extend farther out in the ocean than any
adjoining or neighboring territory. But none is
imaginatively more at the end of the line than the Keys. Key
West is at the terminus of the country’s Highway No. 1. It’s
a place where people wind up when they’ve had it with everyplace
else. What they’re searching for is something
elusive. It’s a place that Jimmy Buffett calls
Margaritaville and Trinidad Joe calls Lime Key. Key West is
not that place, exactly. But it’s the closest thing to it. |
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Date Submitted:
2001-07-17 00:00:00
Review by The Spiritual Traveler |
Copyright Information:
Copyright ©The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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