New Times writers: We investigate your city. We review your live shows. We select the cream of the crop in the annual Best of Miami issue. And yes, we write your snarky blog posts.
But you can't pigeonhole us, man. We're real people, with goals and dreams. And in between tracking down the source of A-Rod's 'roids and reading haters' Facebook comments to our stories, some of us get a little writing done on the side. And the really good writers actually get stuff published in honest-to-god books.
Robert Andrew Powell's Running Away, profiled in this week's issue, is one of several recent or upcoming books by New Times alumni. Here are several others.
See also: Author Robert Andrew Powell Endures a Marathon and Wrestles His Demons in a New Memoir
Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball's Steroid Era, by Tim Elfrink and Gus Garcia-Roberts
New Times managing editor Elfrink and former staff writer Garcia-Roberts teamed up to write the definitive book on the Alex Rodriguez steroid scandal. Blood Sport grew from Elfrink's George Polk Award-winning investigation for New Times, which revealed that the Coral Gables clinic Biogenesis had provided A-Rod and other sports stars with performance-enhancing drugs. The book dives deeper into A-Rod's doomed desire for chemical advantage as well as Miami's role as the nation's seedy steroid capital. Above all, Blood Sport is about Americans' obsession with the Fountain of Youth and how it has tainted our national pastime. It's out July 8.
The Slippage, by Ben Greenman
Greenman, a former calendar editor at New Times and until recently an editor at The New Yorker, appears to tweet on the hour every hour. Somewhere in between, he writes wry and wondrous stories. His most recent work is The Slippage, a novel about suburban unhappiness. "The success of The Slippage lies in this hazy, in-between state of being, where Greenman can reflect on loneliness through his characters, adrift in their own personal grids of sadness," writes the New York Times.
See also: Ben Greenman on The Slippage, Mocking Miami Beach Cops, and "Secret Nazi Sex Caves"
Against Football, by Steve Almond
Almond, another former staff writer, may be even more prodigious than Greenman. He has made a name for himself with off-the-wall short stories, a nonfiction book about the candy industry, and a collection of angry, incisive essays titled (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions. His upcoming book, Against Football, promises to be his most polemic. Due out in September, Against Football is exactly what it sounds like: a manifesto against the sport that Almond himself loves. As if that's not enough to get your attention, Almond tells New Times that the book includes a chapter called "The Love Song of Richie Incognito."
South by Southeast, by Gail Shepherd
A former New Times Broward-Palm Beach food critic and staff writer, Shepherd is set to publish her latest middle-grade novel in 2016. South by Southeast is about a Vietnamese-American girl coming of age in post-Vietnam War Tennessee.
Brie Season, by Jen Karetnick
Karetnick, a former restaurant critic and columnist for New Times, will release her first full-length poetry collection, appropriately titled Brie Season, later this year.
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