If you maintain even a slight interest in humanity or, at least, have a keen set of eyes, you might’ve stumbled upon notes or photos or objects set adrift from their rightful owners. Grocery lists, unsent notes, half-torn documents, withered and aged photographs: in thrift stores or on the Metrorail, they are abound—floating, fragmented pieces of the human fabric. Writer and founder of Found Magazine Davy Rothbart has shared these pieces of strangers’ lives for the past fifteen years.

The high-fives break out instantaneously like a saloon brawl.
Five dollar bill in front of the Kwik-Stop.
Surprise party patrons in paper hats crouching
underneath the dinette set. Spider web.
Bubble wrap. Kick-ass. Apollo pulling the stink of the night away
from his V-8 supercharged chariot. The stimulus check
comes in the mail! The stimulus check is cashed!

Christian and I dropped acid
at beautiful Scott’s wedding, all eyes
taking in light and shadow of bride and groom,
entwined tongues reaping applause from Old World grandmothers,
Christian teetering, red-browed
as he slid the garter up a 16-year-old’s thigh (more applause).

The KWLS is similar to the Miami Book Fair in that it attracts a lot of high-wattage writers. With about two dozen writers per session, the Key West event is smaller than the seemingly-infinite Miami event. At Book Fair, the writers usually have one fifteen to forty-five minute session on stage. At the seminar they tend to go up three or four times over the weekend, and you get to know the writers. Or at least feel you do.

The latent doubleness of everything, often waiting for the future to unearth it, spreads under all that Gibson writes, and it works because it seems to mimic the ways in which we can respond to and map the world we currently move in. I went to interview Gibson about his new book of essays, Distrust that Particular Flavor, at the Key West Literary Seminar in January. We met, but he felt a little too out of it for a sit-down talk. Instead, we decided on an email exchange.

There is this illusion, this facade of Miami being the next thing, but very rarely do people examine the fact that Miami is a place that exists in the perpetual idea of the next thing. There is no resolution. With this line of thinking, we can compare the city to a hype man backing up a rapper. I don’t know who or what force the rapper might be, so I’ll leave it with that.

In 1987 T.D. Allman published one of the definitive accounts of modern Miami. Miami: City of the Future was as unapologetic as it was prescient. Since then, he has written on many different topics, including another book on the history of Florida. Published this spring—Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State has received full-page reviews in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both Finding Florida and Miami: City of the Future will be featured books at this year’s Miami Book Fair International.