Chiefs

A madcap affair, Chiefs is a Dantesque epic where Old Crow-of the Calusa tribe-captains the seas of time and reignites an unfinished game of stickball, "a game designed for dying." And there's more at stake than the humorous debates on "the virtues and shortcomings of Smokey and the Bandit II," it's the loss of a people, "something like a nation, but more, though still struggling, still restless, still waiting." Lyrically rich, Chiefs is a novel where history, identity, and the knowable are blurred, mixing "peoples, voices, songs, and ways to mark moonrise." To follow Trammell's Crow is to descend through Florida's vibrant and violent history of shifting landscapes, football, and tribal conflicts. With Burt Reynolds at our side, confronting the unknown together, we read and ask "is this dream real," or are we "just ghosts too?" --Timothy Daniel Welch,