ABOUT THIS BOOK

Eighteen unforgettable stories of women navigating the beauty and chaos of Miami.

The Tamiami Trail cuts through the contradictions of Miami: a city shaped by swamps and skyscrapers, violence and desire. In Tamiami Trail: Miami Stories, Jennifer Bannan brings us eighteen vivid portraits of women navigating this teeming, volatile landscape.

An adolescent trapped in a toxic relationship. A middle-aged woman entangled with a reckless boy. A marketing executive profiting off the chaos of hurricanes. These women—mothers, daughters, lovers—take their chances in a world where environmental and personal disasters collide, where the ocean’s expanse mirrors the risks they take with their own lives.

Steamy, sharp, and deeply human, Tamiami Trail depicts the beauty and brutality of Miami, evoking its lush landscapes and relentless energy. With wit and sharp insight, Bannan maps the unruly desires that drive her unforgettable characters and the city that shapes them.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jennifer Bannan is an author based in Pittsburgh with her husband, Sean Eckenrod, and son, Cypress Bard. She has had stories in the Autumn House Press anthology, Keeping the Wolves at Bay, and has been published in literary journals including the Kenyon Review online, ACM, Passages North, and The Chicago Quarterly Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Millions, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post.

REVIEWS

"It’s easy to make fun of Florida, hard to understand it, but in these compelling stories Jennifer Bannan beautifully evokes the complex allure of her home city of Miami, from its cypresses, palms, pines, and sawgrass, to its 'bluster and machismo.' The teen girls and women in these stories map their own desires and longing onto this treacherous landscape.”

— Elisabeth Cohen, author of The Glitch

"This artful collection brims with wit and thwarted desire and the unruly demands of the heart. Bannan’s stories are astute portrayals of lives messy with love and heartbreak."

— Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North

Previous praise for Jennifer Bannan:

"Bannan is after a kind of truth most literary writers try to avoid: brutal honesty in the face of all the bad things human being do to each other."

— Keith Banner

Previous praise for Jennifer Bannan:

"Bannan artfully guides her narrators and her readers away from despair and toward calm and honest reflection."

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

"Clinging to their tangential morality by way of a mystical sense of place, the characters in Tamiami Trail are flawed and full of want. Their grasping opportunism contrasts with the ineffable honoring of place and myth, thus revealing their naked humanity."

— Foreword Reviews

TABLE OF CONTENTS

9This Crisis Brought to You by Me
24My Communist Leanings
26Museness
38To Be a Girlfriend
40Pulling Plaid
49Enough
51You’re Always Game
63Protection
65Tidal
74Coke
77Lobscouse
88Hole
90Bed, Futon, Couch
102Cessna
104You Must Not Return to Your Childhood Room
119Home Again
121The Pairs
134The Devastated
137Power Shovel