While working with his father's small company that "trashes out"—enters and empties—foreclosed homes in Florida, Paul Reyes wrote Exiles in Eden, a portrayal of his own family and the people and communities affected by the foreclosure crisis.
Grounded in Florida and Reyes family history, and with character-driven visits to the dark corners of this crisis—including with those who are calling for revolution—Reyes explores the human element of this frightening rattling of the American Dream. From examining the unique "ecosystems" of each failed mortgage to witnessing parts of abandoned Florida returning to its wild natural state, Reyes takes the reader far from the machinations of Wall Street to the sun-baked side streets where the true costs of this crisis can be seen. The result is a portrait of an America where the exiled insist on the right to their own America dreams, even as the terms are forcibly redrawn.
Paul Reyes’s writing has appeared in the Oxford American, The New York Times, Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review, Details, the Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Slate. He is the winner of a 2010 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tampa, Florida.
When I ask my father what he remembers about the first houses he trashed out—a phrase we use to describe the process of entering a home that has been foreclosed upon by the bank, and which the bank would like to sell, and hauling all of what the dispossessed owner has left behind to the nearest dump, then returning to clean the place by spraying every corner and wiping every inch of glass, deleting every fingerprint, scrubbing the boot marks off the linoleum, bleaching the cruddy toilets, sweeping up the hair and sand and dust, steaming the stains out of the carpet (or, if the carpet is
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