Of Slash Pines and Manatees:
A Highly Selective Field Guide
to My Suburban Wilderness
Forthcoming March 2025 from University Press of Florida
“With this volume of witty and perceptive essays, Andrew Furman adds South Florida to the literary map, joining the lineage of place-based American writers ranging from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry. Even if you have never set foot in what he calls his ‘asphalt-frosted’ home territory, his book will invite you to see your own natural and cultural landscape with deeper appreciation.”
—Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination
“Through figures as various and variously lovely as orange blossom, night herons, stingrays, and dulse seaweed, Furman takes us on a deep-dive tour through Floridian—and, by extension, American—history and its changing environment. This book not only makes me want to go to Florida but also to spend every minute there outdoors, hoping to see with vision as fresh and sweet as Furman’s the world he lives in and loves.”
—Nicole Walker, author of Sustainability: A Love Story
“A rich gathering of brilliantly conceived and gracefully executed literary forays into the surprising wildness of nearby nature. Furman has deftly braided natural history, playful curiosity, and deep insight into a narrative rope strong enough to pull us back into our home places with sharpened awareness, and with a renewed appreciation for the more-than-human world that always surrounds us.”
—Michael P. Branch, author of On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World’s Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer
The World That We Are
Forthcoming Fall 2025 from Regal House Publishing
What an intelligent and innovative tribute to Thoreau, the possibilities of love, and the wonder of the natural world. I’ve long admired Furman’s nature writing, and with his new novel, he adeptly carries the reader from vital environmental concerns (never have I cared so much about seaweed!) and into a sumptuous reimagining of American literary history. Throughout these deftly twinned tales, Furman shares inspired, honest meditation on the sometimes confounding, ultimately capacious chambers of the human heart. The World That We Are is a beautiful book.
—Emily Nemens, author of The Cactus League
“Seldom in recent years have I read a novel that brings pleasure in every sentence, every sound. The World That We Are does more than pay homage to Henry David Thoreau. Andrew Furman’s carefully researched novel moves flawlessly from past to present, drawing from Thoreau’s Journal and other sources to the fictional David Hertzog, a contemporary scholar who—like Thoreau—struggles to anchor his life in love. Hertzog, widowed, estranged from his daughter, lives alone at the outset of the novel. His morning walks through Maine woods and brisk swims across a pond are the closest he comes to joy, or what Thoreau might call gratitude for the “peculiar intelligence” of the earth. His routines take a sharp turn when his daughter, Ellen, shows up unannounced one morning, and the stories of father and daughter, of a wife and mother lost to tragedy, unfold layer by layer, in perfect prose. The World That We Are is a love story with no shred of sentimentality. Thoreau’s insight (‘How insufficient is all wisdom without love’) becomes Hertzog’s insight. His life, like Thoreau’s, expands from the self to include family, community, a potential lover, and the wide earth which sustains us all.”
—James Janko, author of The Wire-Walker
Cover Design: James Knake; Cover Image: David M. Tripp
Jewfish
“Furman’s hapless hero, angler Nathan Pray, doesn’t care about promoting his business with catchy puns—he cares about the game fish snook, which is struggling to survive in a changing climate, and he cares about doing the right thing: as a fisherman, as a father, as a Jew, and as a man. With humor, sensitivity, and tender insight, Jewfish illuminates the delicate ecosystems that both fish and man must navigate in the face of inexorable change.”
—Margot Singer, author of Underground Fugue and The Pale of Settlement
“In his richly detailed rendering of Florida’s coastal waters and the unforgettable characters who fish them, Furman brings readers into a new relationship with this watery wilderness. In its lyrical prose and deep humanity, Jewfish reminds us that in life, as in fishing, we all need a shot at redemption.”
—Michael P. Branch, author of Rants from the Hill and Raising Wild
“Andrew Furman’s Jewfish is a wonderfully pungent, funny, sad, and human novel centering on his paradoxical hero, Nathan Pray, a small-time, barely commercial South Florida fisherman with a naturalist’s sensibility. With unfailing wit and heart, Furman brings us close as his characters face loss, temptation, and testing, and shows how, even in this cockamamie 21st century, strugglers doing the impractical, right thing may, sometimes, prevail.”
—Lynne Barrett, author of Magpies
Goldens Are Here
"Aromatic and heady, fearless and far-reaching, this complicated novel imagines Florida fifty years ago, with all the beauty and all the threat of the era concentrated in a fine story of courage and place. The setting is mythic Florida, in an orange grove, in the middle of social transformation. Kudos to Furman for recreating this rich and unbelievable world. What I loved most was the book’s feast of language, its flavor and sensuality. And of course I loved Janisse."
—Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and The Seed Underground
"'There was something glorious about an examination with a stethoscope,' muses Isaac Golden, the searching, hopeful patriarch in Andrew Furman’s novel, Goldens Are Here. 'This laying on of hands. This reverent silence. . . . Here was the real, Isaac thought.' Readers looking for the real will find it in Furman’s careful attunement to place (tamarind, lantana, wax myrtle; Parson Brown, Hamlin, Valencia) and time (the Space Age and the Civil Rights struggle). Furman gives this moment in our collective history its due with nuance, warmth, and a palpable sense of family grief and love."
—Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse
"Andrew Furman's Goldens Are Here is a smart, generous, and engrossing look at the civil rights struggle in Florida. A fascinating meditation on what it means to be a neighbor in a highly unjust world."
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Story
MORE PRAISE FOR GOLDENS ARE HERE
“Furman’s characters live, breathe, hurt, and love vibrantly on the page as you follow them on their journeys among the orange groves and around town as they discover what for each of them—like Isaac’s seed experimentations—seems an unlikely pursuit, which is the heart of Goldens Are Here. . . .The lifeblood of Furman’s novel is the seeming conviction that each of his main characters’ personal experiments are worthy pursuits because trial and error is how we learn to love one another more deeply. . . . Even Furman himself took a chance with such an ambitious novel, but Goldens Are Here astutely investigates one of America’s cultural epochs by peeling back the historical rind of who we were and reveals who we still are, deep down, as Americans.”
—Mike Robbins, Flyway
“Andrew Furman’s Goldens Are Here (Green Writers Press) is a highly original story about a Jewish family and its connection to the land. . . . Furman captures the era, with the Cold War escalating, racial relations strained under Jim Crow laws, and anti-Semitism present too. He’s also attuned to the singular landscape of the orange groves through the seasons, including summer with its ‘dragon-breath heat’ . . . . Furman creates memorable characters, with beautiful prose and a love of the natural world—detailing palmetto, magnolia, sweet gum, and other trees, as well as orange varietals—and some Yiddish vernacular thrown in. Readers are likely to crave a glass of fresh-squeezed juice.”
—Sandee Brawarsky, The New York Jewish Week
“Goldens Are Here is a fine, highly original novel. . . . The Goldens are clearly outsiders, and the way they are addressed by many of the townspeople carries a brand of politeness that barely veils a cultural tradition of anti-Semitism. Author Andrew Furman portrays how Isaac and Melody deal with their displacement and discomfort with skill and sensitivity. . . . This is an extremely ambitious novel, delightfully blending the ups and downs of domestic life, an exploration of culturally engrained prejudices, the East-Central Florida ethos, the major issues of national and international concern, and the vibrant interplay of man and nature. I love the author’s chutzpah in bringing this all together, and I love the cascades of language and lists that carry it along.”
—Phil Jason, Florida Weekly
Bitten
"An eloquent testament to the impact of the special places that exist both in the natural world and within our hearts."
—Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle
“This love letter to the Sunshine State is a collection of witty observations and simple pleasures”
—Publisher’s Weekly
My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White
"Part memoir, part social history, Furman’s book is a meditation on integration."
—Forward
"Furman’s style is highly inviting. A fresh approach to discussions on race in America."
—Derek Royal, editor of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author
Alligators May be Present
"In his endearing debut novel . . . Furman explores with remarkable compassion and hope the twin mysteries of loss and abandonment, and the constant struggle to keep at bay the aching burden of sadness that threatens even the most peaceful and quiet of lives."
—Aryeh Lev Stollman, author of The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul
