This state inspires so much great prose, it’s amazing we can keep up.

Here’s a half dozen great new Florida books you need to get your mitts on.

THEY PUT UP A PARKING LOT: From some of the same folks who brought you a Pulitzer Prize comes Paving Paradise (University Press of Florida, $27). Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite tell a complex and on-its-face unsexy story about water in Florida. But it works, drawing readers into its difficult subject by resorting to the dirtiest trick in the journalist’s bag of tricks: great storytelling.

Pittman and Waite use several people – some heroic, some shady – to examine the political shell game that makes white equal black and no equal yes. They tell the story through the eyes of politicians, developers, bait-shop owners and a league of people who mourn what’s happened to this state.

Based on their award-winning series for the St. Petersburg Times, Paving Paradise is the perfect way to give a longer shelf life to a vital work of journalism. Pittman and Waite are a couple of the best journalists practicing the craft in the country today.

It makes us wonder if there will be a place for journalism like this in a few years. If newspapers still exist, will they give over this much space to an in-depth report. Will book publishers then give reporters the space to expand on their work?

This isn’t a story that works well on Twitter.

This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2009.