The Way of Florida
a novel by Russell Persson
Relentless, urgent and above all musical, Russell Persson’s expertly crafted The Way of Florida recasts the tragic story of the failed Narváez expedition, which has trickled down through the centuries via La Relación, the official report published in 1542, as well as many other subsequent retellings. A calamitous attempt to establish Spanish colonies along the Gulf Coast, of the 300 crew sent inland to explore, only four survived this eight-year ordeal. In bracing, beautiful language this timely narrative of botched colonialism, now in its first American Edition, radically reimagines the parameters and responsibilities of the historical novel. Linguistically rich, sinuous, and maybe even heroic, The Way of Florida offers historical fiction like you have never read it before.
an excerpt from The Way of Florida
We visit our life just once. It could rain down or it could sun a string of days or an unended ease could be what days you live in but I come to believe we visit our life just once this only one time in which we live, the string of days entire from one until the end. Inside this now I live with my body underneath the sky the stars there I would bet the stars set up there in measure of what we do and pourn down from the moon is my revital. I’m as wracked as any man here and I toil more and eat less and my charge demands that I lift us to the next day and so it is I underneath the moon the other men have fallen upon each other in what could be close to giving in as a body spells its coming day and sapped to the utmost lands where it might and I the moon addresses and it is I the moon floods up with sand for what’s upcoming so that I may guide in some way these rafted men who pell- mell upon each other like blown twigs I lie here standed to that task our Lord I become the one who gathers them in to proceed us all into the. Could I call out my desire to be finished to no longer have to witness the men in shapes so drawn and beyond the fetch of hope? What was possible was aside that and my invigor in night my hands on gunwales or so my solemn moon has come on to breed in me the sons of light and the sons in me of the trick who heals me I tread here alone it’s mine evening sky alone.
About the Author
Russell Persson is a writer living in Reno, Nevada. The first American edition of his first novel, The Way of Florida, first published by Little Island Press in 2018, is forthcoming from Baobab Press in 2025. His second book, These Threads Who Lead to Bramble, will be published by Dzanc Books in 2025. His work has appeared in Unsaid Magazine, The Quarterly, 3AM Magazine, NY Tyrant, Hotel Magazine, Territory, and other literary journals.
Praise for The Way of Florida
“I’m not sure how a novel can feel ancient and entirely new at the same time. But in the hands of Russell Persson, The Way of Florida accomplishes this extraordinary feat with an artistry seldom seen in American fiction. This is a one-of-a-kind book by a writer whose sentences dazzle with their strange and haunting music.”
“Reading The Way of Florida, one can nearly hear the Earth turn. Persson’s polyphonous prose’s spare but startling effects are truly one of a kind; it’s a metaphysical masterpiece in serial miniature, exquisitely carved from the very gruesome core of how we’re here.”
“Neil Armstrong hoped that someone, some day, would erase the footprints he had left on the moon. It is in this spirit that Russell Persson revisits the ill-fated Narváez expedition, covering the explorers’ tracks before loosing his characters into lostness. With no backstory to speak of, or veritable narrative arc, The Way of Florida is a historical novel from which history has been all but excised, allowing a deep immersion in the here and now of lives conducted in extremis. Persson seems to have taken English back to the dawn of language, producing a newly-minted idiom that feels both antiquated and timeless. This outlandish debut is a singular masterpiece.”
“Captivated by the author’s trenchant, zigzagging, and reversing phrases, the reader finds themselves living the emotions of the men of a colonial expedition almost all of whom perish. There is grandeur in this tale.”
“Dark, dark, dark, this incessantly numinous account of the funding of the planetary genius which, at any cost, the terrible genies of appropriation disport themselves on native soil, makes for an unprecedented work of language gorgeously twisted by the torsions of narrative necessity. It also makes for a great book. Entrancing in its choral pursuit of the realities of man’s irresistible consumption of man, The Way of Florida rushes Russell Persson to the fore of notable American novelists, men and women who refuse the conventions handed them. Ah, good conscience tells me I might instead have simply – and thus more truly – said, ‘I’m floored’.”
“The Way of Florida is, for the figures in the narrative, a doomed and reckless course. But for Russell Persson it is the manner by which he achieves absolute triumph. Here is a strange, bracing, wholly original novel, just when we need it.”
“Russell Persson does with Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative what Nick Cave did with traditional murder ballads: hones it, gives it a sharp edge, and makes it seem almost uncomfortably close. An incantatory and compelling read, one that will stick with you long after the book is closed.”
“The Way of Florida is a brilliant take on the historical novel. The Narváez expedition continues to be a failed one, of course, but getting lost in Russell Persson’s strange language feels like a beautiful and hallucinatory triumph.”
“Persson, God, where does one begin? There is a seriousness to the pages of Russell Persson that is rarely seen in this age of the instantaneous. Read Persson closely and you will see that he is extremely defiant. He is also extremely subtle in his defiance.”
“The Way of Florida is a compact, driving, rhythmical work . . . complex, rich, sinuous – a novel, but quite unlike most.”
Book Details
Title: The Way of Florida: a novel
Author: Russell Persson
Publication Date: February 11, 2025
Trade Paperback
5.5 x 8.5
256 pages
ISBN: 978-1-936097-54-8
$17.95
Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123
Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
