Orlando, Florida. Summer of 2009. The Magic are steamrolling through the NBA playoffs, but your life is falling apart. For years you were told that Orlando was the city of the future. Every new high-rise condo and sparkling subdivision confirmed this. Now the boom years are over, and your fiancé is gone. Your house-flipping partner emptied the bank account, sold off the staging furniture, and skipped town. You're an abandoned man with an empty McMansion you can't afford, and a dozen properties you can't sell. What's your next move, big guy? 
Bookended by a choose-your-own-adventure story and a final exam, Bright Lights, Medium-sized City is a formally inventive city novel in the tradition of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Bright Lights follows Marc Turner, a toxic male and hapless house-flipper caught in Orlando's collapsing housing market. Through text, comic panels, and watercolor illustrations, Nathan Holic's third novel shepherds readers from the glitz of downtown block parties to the grit of the Bithlo school bus races, with a spiraling detour in which the spirits of Orlando's past confront Marc and force him to realize the danger of his own ambitions.

Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City

Literature & Fiction

Holic, Nathan

Literary

Burrow Pr

At age 18 Alysia Sawchyn was diagnosed with bipolar I. Seven years later she learned she had been misdiagnosed. A Fish Growing Lungs takes the form of linked essays that reflect on Sawchyn's diagnosis and its unraveling, the process of withdrawal and recovery, and the search for identity as she emerges from a difficult past into a cautiously hopeful present. 
Sawchyn captures the precariousness of life under the watchful eye of doctors, friends, and family, in which saying or doing the wrong thing could lead to involuntary confinement. This scrutiny is compounded by the stigmas of mental illness and the societal expectations placed on the bodies of women and women of color. And yet, amid juggling medications, doubting her diagnosis, and struggling with addiction and cutting, there is also joy, friendship, love, and Slayer concerts. 
Funny, intelligent, and unflinchingly honest, Sawchyn explores how we can come to know ourselves when our bodies betray us. Drawing from life experience, literature, music, medical journals, films, and recovery communities, each essay illuminates the richness of self-knowledge that comes from the act of writing itself.

A Fish Growing Lungs: Essays

Biographies & Memoirs

Sawchyn, Alysia Li Ying

Community & Culture

''As weird and funny and beautiful and unnerving as you might expect from some of our state's best writers.'' --Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! 
Florida is more than just fodder for hard-boiled crime novels and zany farces. This anthology of new stories and essays challenges a star-studded line up of current and former Floridians to write about the state through a literary lens, though not without the requisite weirdness. The Florida within this book contains: lightning, oil spills, road rage, a lizard tied to a balloon, swimmers, sleepwalkers, characters that love Florida, characters that hate Florida, and at least three sinkholes.

We Can't Help It If We're from Florida: New Stories from a Sinking Peninsula

Shane Hinton

United States

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