I’m a fifth generation Miami native, and Miami is my bad boyfriend. The traffic, the construction, the daily drama, and let’s not forget hurricanes—it could all make you crazy. But Miamians are never dull. We are passionate about everything. I kinda love that about us. While you may associate my city with glitz and bling, what’s glamourous about Miami happens naturally. It’s the water, the glorious weather, fresh ripe mangoes and avocadoes right off the tree, and our vibrant multicultural community. With this Shepherd list, and with my cookbook Miami Vegan, I want to give you a delicious taste of the tropics, a taste of my home. Without the hurricanes.
I did not want to love this book. I resisted reading it because everyone told me how great it was, and how the author nailed living in Miami. I’m glad I came around, because they were right.
This is not the glamorous Miami of celebs, this is the real gritty Miami, a city of immigrants like the Jamaican-American family who we come to know and care about in Escoffery’s punchy connected short stories. It explores identity, culture, racism, family, and finding home. It haunts me still. I want to know what’s next for this family, and that the characters are doing okay.
'Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory' MARLON JAMES
'An absolute delight to read' DIANA EVANS
'Superb ... A strong, much needed new voice in our literature' PERCIVAL EVERETT
'A compelling hurricane of a book' ANN PATCHETT
A major debut that follows a Jamaican family in Miami navigating recession, racism and Hurricane Andrew.
1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm.
Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion, greeting him…
Here is another title I resisted reading (are you sensing a trend?). I think it’s because, being a fifth-generation Florida native, I’m protective of my home state.
While Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry have mined South Florida for its comic weirdness, Groff brings an almost Gothic element to these short stories, plus lyrical prose and messed-up characters I wouldn’t want to hang with but who absolutely move me.
I felt their yearning. I felt Florida’s humidity and the mosquitoes too. They’re characters unto themselves.
From the universally acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies and Matrix
Florida is a "superlative" book (Boston Globe), "frequently funny" (San Francisco Chronicle), "brooding, inventive and often moving" (NPR Fresh Air) --as Groff is recognized as "Florida's unofficial poet laureate, as Joan Didion was for California." (Washington Post)
In her thrilling new book, Lauren Groff brings the reader into a physical world that is at once domestic and wild—a place where the hazards of the natural world…
A witchy paranormal cozy mystery told through the eyes of a fiercely clever (and undeniably fabulous) feline familiar.
I’m Juno. Snow-white fur, sharp-witted, and currently stuck working magical animal control in the enchanted town of Crimson Cove. My witch, Zandra Crypt, and I only came here to find her missing…
Chef Norman Van Aken is one of the first chefs to celebrate South Florida’s delicious mix of cultures and cuisines and bring that party to the plate. He’s also an exuberant, wild writer and raconteur (I mean, the guy started out as a carnie, okay?).
While he’s perhaps best known for his seminal cookbook New American Cuisine, I prefer this more recent book, written with his son. Here Norman doesn’t go for cheffy, elaborate recipes—he presents Key West living and eating in all its laidback, sweaty, and slightly wacky splendor.
Recipes like Five Bros. Black Eye’d Pea Bollos, and Forbidden Fruit Cocktail are doable for most home cooks and give the tropical flavor of the Keys. So does his delicious storytelling. It’s like catching up with your favorite bro over a couple of beers..
Award-winning chef Norman Van Aken has been cooking in Florida for 40 years. My Key West Kitchen is his love letter to Key West, where he first found the passion to cook, and where the unique cultural makeup of the island influenced his cuisine today. Follow Chef Van Aken as he strolls through Key West, reminiscing and re-creating dishes from little joints" and restaurants both past and present. Organized by well-known Key West neighborhoods, the chapters include Duval and Downtown Crawlin'," Places in the Hoods," Places on the Water," and Around Town These Days." In each, Norman includes recipes for…
What makes Miami the Magic City isn’t in Miami. It starts about 40 miles south. It’s the Florida Everglades, 1.5 million acres of wilderness spread across three counties.
It’s much more than its storied swamp and alligators. The Everglades is also tangled hardwood hammock, pine rockland, sawgrass prairie, cypress stand, and Florida Bay.
I kinda grew up in the Everglades and feel a kinship with Douglas, who understood, loved, and articulated the Everglades to the world. I wish I could write about it with half her poetic language and passion. Because as urban sprawl eats away at the Everglades, we’re at risk of losing it.
Reading Douglas’ book reminds me how precious it is. I wish I could make it mandatory reading for every developer and tourist.
Before 1947, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas named The Everglades a "river of grass," most people considered the area worthless. She brought the world's attention to the need to preserve The Everglades. In the Afterword, Michael Grunwald tells us what has happened to them since then. Grunwald points out that in 1947 the government was in the midst of establishing the Everglades National Park and turning loose the Army Corps of Engineers to control floods--both of which seemed like saviors for the Glades. But neither turned out to be the answer. Working from the research he did for his book, The…
This is the fourth book in the Joplin/Halloran forensic mystery series, which features Hollis Joplin, a death investigator, and Tom Halloran, an Atlanta attorney.
It's August of 2018, shortly after the Republican National Convention has nominated Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. Racial and political tensions are rising, and so…
I’m a sucker for coming-of-age novels, and this one has resonated with me since I read it when I was 12.
The novel is now revered for the way Hurston folded African folkways into the novel, but I didn’t know or care about that. I was wrapped up in the story.
Who is Janie, who’s suddenly come back to Eatonville, Florida (Hurston’s own home) after years away? I didn’t understand then why Janie, the book’s protagonist, kept making the choices she did. Oh, why do any of us? But I kept cheering for her and worrying for her despite her failed marriages and broken dreams, on the rough road to selfhood.
Cover design by Harlem renaissance artist Lois Mailou Jones
When Janie, at sixteen, is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams, who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds ...
'For me, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is one of the very greatest American novels of the 20th century. It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought, but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling piece…
Feast on Miami Vegan, a plant-based celebration of the tropics, brimming with bold Latin and Caribbean flavors and beloved dishes reflecting Miami’s delicious diversity. Award-winning author and Miami native Ellen Kanner brings Miami to your table with over 80 recipes delivering succulence, sizzle, and the big sun-drenched flavors you love— all with a plant-based spin.
Discover how the spangle of citrus, the gentle warmth of chiles and spices, and the bounty of fresh green herbs have the power to transform even simple staples like rice and beans into a party-worthy hot pot that feeds a crowd. Miami Vegan brings the city’s bright tropical flavors to your kitchen with vibrant, accessible recipes so you can enjoy the taste of Miami no matter where you live.
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
Secrets, lies, and second chances are served up beneath the stars in this moving novel by the bestselling author of This Is Not How It Ends. Think White Lotus meets Virgin River set at a picturesque mountain inn.
Seven days in summer. Eight lives forever changed. The stage is…
