Bright Lights, Medium-sized City: a novel

“A Florida magnum opus." –DAVID JAMES POISSANT, author of Lake Life

Orlando, Florida. Summer of 2009. The Magic are steamrolling through the NBA playoffs, but your life is falling apart. For years you were told that Orlando was the city of the future. Every new high-rise condo and sparkling subdivision confirmed this. Now the boom years are over, and your fiancé is gone. Your house-flipping partner emptied the bank account, sold off the staging furniture, and skipped town. You’re an abandoned man with an empty McMansion you can’t afford, and a dozen properties you can’t sell. What’s your next move, big guy?

Bookended by a choose-your-own-adventure story and a final exam, Bright Lights, Medium-sized City is a formally inventive city novel in the tradition of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Bright Lights follows Marc Turner, a toxic male and hapless house-flipper caught in Orlando’s collapsing housing market. Through text, comic panels, and watercolor illustrations, Nathan Holic’s third novel shepherds readers from the glitz of downtown block parties to the grit of the Bithlo school bus races, with a spiraling detour in which the spirits of Orlando’s past confront Marc and force him to realize the danger of his own ambitions.