Longboat Key

“Just when you thought that Florida in the late fifties was all late-Deco, well-meaning snowbirds, and honest speculation in blameless retirement homes, Zeugner puts on display a dirty-laundry list of the blemishes that made post-war Florida a far cry from pastel structures and water-ski gardens, Esther Williams style. This is a world—an unwitting hell?—where shady real-estate Ponzi schemes run parallel to the fakery of life itself, of just being. It is a last outpost, humanity’s sorry land’s end, metaphorized in the haunting wartime memory of the delusional beached soldier in the Philippines, who struggled uselessly to stuff his gut back into his own body, in order to become whole again.”

Lee Fontanella

“Set in the 1960s, John Zeugner’s latest book, Longboat Key, is a great insight into a time gone by in Florida. In those days, the people who came to this tiny island off Sarasota were each about seventeen degrees off center, and John has brought them to life for us to enjoy! The characters are real (I knew most of them) and John manages to capture their very zany, hard-to-believe-if-it weren’t-true personalities. When the story comes to an end, you will wish it could go on and on—just to see what happens next!”

John Lilly