A Virtual Evening with Kent Russell and Karen Russell

Event Date: July 7, 2020 7:00 pm

Kent and Karen Russell (siblings & incredible authors) discuss Kent’s new book “In the Land of Good Living”, a love letter to his sprawling, brazenly varied home state – Florida. Presented in partnership with Miami Book Fair on July 7, 2020.

In the summer of 2016, Kent Russell–broke, at loose ends, hungry for adventure–set off to walk across Florida. Mythic, superficial, soaked in contradictions, maligned by cultural elites, segregated from the South, and literally vanishing into the sea, Florida (or, as he calls it: “America Concentrate”) seemed to Russell to embody America’s divided soul. The narrative overflows with historical detail about how modern Florida came into being after World War II, and how it came to be a petri dish for life in a suddenly, increasingly diverse new land of minority-majority cities and of unrivaled ethnic and religious variety. It is a book that is wildly vivid, encyclopedic, erudite, and ferociously irreverent–a deeply ambivalent love letter to his sprawling, brazenly varied home state.

In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida by Kent Russell