By Andrew Furman. University Press of Florida, 2025.

Wings and talons clatter against a windowpane. Foxes den under a deck. Pines stand in quarter-acre lots, recalling a vanished forest. In this book, Andrew Furman explores touchpoints between his everyday suburban life and the environment in South Florida, contemplating his place in a subtropical landscape stretching from the Everglades to the warm Atlantic coast.

Transportive vignettes of encounters in the natural world blend with ordinary, all-too-relatable stories of home and family life in these chapters. Puzzled and fascinated by the plants and animals he meets while continually preoccupied by busy domestic routines, Furman illustrates the beauty of his “suburban wilderness.” He also reckons with changes and threats to the surrounding landscape. How, he asks, should humans go about living in what is simultaneously one of the most overdeveloped and most naturally beautiful states in the country?

Furman’s meditations give rise to an environmental ethic that challenges distinctions between nature and culture, wilderness and civilization, solitude and family life. Rather, with humor and hope, he encourages readers to engage in life with the mindset that the human and non-human are inextricably connected—and to ask how they can better belong together.

Andrew Furman is a professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and teaches in its MFA program in creative writing. His fiction and creative nonfiction frequently engage with the Florida outdoors, with essays and stories appearing in such publications as Prairie Schooner, Oxford American, The Southern Review, Santa Monica Review, Ecotone, Willow Springs, Poets & Writers, Terrain.org, Flyway, and The Florida Review. He is the author, most recently, of the novels Jewfish (Little Curlew Press, 2020) and Goldens Are Here (Green Writers Press, 2018), and the memoir Bitten: My Unexpected Love Affair with Florida (University Press of Florida, 2014), which was named a finalist for the ASLE Environmental Book Award. Two books are forthcoming in 2025: Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Field Guide to My Suburban Wilderness (University Press of Florida) and a novel, The World That We Are (Regal House Publishing). He lives in south Florida with his family.