Torrid Zone: Seven Stories from the Gulf Coast

by Jonathan Evan Maslow

Torrid Zone is a magical and steamy collection of tales from the swamps and bayous of the deepest South - the American Gulf Coast. In his first work of fiction, naturalist and travel writer Jonathan Maslow takes readers on a riotous tour of human geography in the land of Mardi Gras and pirates' treasure. Meet Cesar Fuentes, last of the Tampa cigar-factory lectors, the readers who turned the toilsome job of hand-rolling cigars into a dangerous political education. No better than she needs to be, Weekee Wachee's "live mermaid," Stevie Rae, tells her hard-luck story in a Gulf Coast blues bar at 3:00 A.M. Captain Babba, a one-legged Vietnam vet, spends his days ferrying tourists to see the whooping cranes of the Texas Gulf Coast until, one day, a Vietnamese tour group shows him a part of the coast no one alive has ever seen. And Estavanico, a saucy African slave, chronicles the travails of a sixteenth-century expedition to the New World gone wrong, playing Sancho Panza to his Conquistador's Don Quixote.

277 pages, Hardcover

First published April 9, 1996

About the author

Jonathan Maslow was a journalist and naturalist whose travels took him from the rain forests of Central America to the steppes of Central Asia. (NY Times)

Reviews

[Chester · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this is a sleeper! Stories retold or just told about the Gulf Coast. I enjoyed the embellished stories and characters. Just enough fiction laced with historical references. A good read indeed. A book to relax with and smile from time to time.