Florida

Authors from Florida write a state that is flat, wet and constantly rebuilt. The tag covers novelists working the comic crime of the Gold Coast, the boat-and-mangrove suspense of the Gulf coast, and the family fiction of towns that swell every season.

It also covers historians and memoirists of the peninsula, plus writers who moved south and let the climate into their books.

Florida writing splits along a line you can see in the listings. Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry take the state's corruption, its developers and its weather and play them for comedy, while James W. Hall and Randy Wayne White work the same mangroves and backwaters as suspense. Randy Wayne White puts a marine biologist on the water; James Grippando and James Patterson run legal and crime plots through Miami and the Gulf coast. Judy Blume and Stephen King both keep Florida addresses in their fiction, and Lauren Groff writes the heat and the sinkholes as a condition of the mind. Chantel Acevedo and Kristin Harmel bring Cuban and wartime threads, Robert Macomber and Nick Wynne the state's maritime and historical record, and Raymond Arsenault its public life. Heather Sellers and Arin Greenwood round out the group. What holds them together is water, heat and a population that keeps arriving.