Miami: no one could have made it up, and yet people keep trying

A new installment in The Guardian's magnificent series on the literature of American cities:

Miami literature and Miami as literature are two completely different things, a tale of two novels, as it were: one a gritty, dystopian thriller where poverty and violence are swallowing the populace, and the other a bildungsroman of eternal optimism. These two fictional states not only co-exist but are mutually dependent upon one another. For there to be progress, after all, there must be something to progress from, and Miami has always evaluated itself in the hypothetical, in what it will be, not what it actually is. So living here sometimes feels like living in the first third of a novel, in which the plucky protagonist is suffering setback after setback, but something must change, right, or why would there be so many pages left?

Miami has always evaluated itself in the hypothetical, in what it will be, not what it actually is

Inside this funhouse of possibilities, writers have always thrived. We’re liars after all, and Miami is where lies go to become the truth....