Ashby Porter creates a world of flowering sadness, Spanish Moss and trailer parks. It is a tale of love ruined under the burning Florida sun amid phantasmagorical settings where present and future, life and death, love and aggression become entangled. The Near Future is a little jewel of a book, a very funny novel about getting - among other things - old, and in Florida, and with less than one's entire dignity in tact. Porter's comic imagination is of the truly droll sort, he homes very closely upon the truth. - Richard Ford