![]() ![]() Some find themselves lost in the book’s speculative elements Loomis County isn’t a real place, but the Calusa shell mounds are real places. Published exactly ten years ago, Russell’s book is somewhat polarizing among the local readership. A great many works of Miami fiction possess this sort of geospatial awareness, but the most intricate and complexly mapped version of our subtropical paradise is Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! ![]() There is also fiction by writers like Edwidge Danticat that traces diasporic journeys across the Caribbean, to and from Miami. One of Miami’s noteworthy exports is crime fiction, in which we watch cops and robbers chase and lead each other around the city. It’s in this spirit, and stuck at home, that I’ve set out to reconsider the landscape of my home the only way I know how: through fiction. Like native Los Angelinos explaining traffic patterns, for example, Miami locals (even the least science-adjacent ones) can be caught at dinner parties regurgitating the word “oolite”-the name of the stone lining South Florida-in attempts to wow some uninformed new arrival. Because of this duality, one of our regional idiosyncrasies is a sort of geo-splaining. There is a limestone ridge that runs along the coast of mainland South Florida, and then every other area is just a place that is susceptible to flooding for myriad reasons. Though imperceptible to the untrained eye, the geography of Miami is at once simple and complicated. ![]()
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