MAYA AND BEN
Got it. Em dash removed, opening updated to match the back cover. Here is the revised description.
Amazon Product Description - Revised
A contemporary short story set in Miami, from the author of Detours and Passage.
It is late October in Miami when two seventeen-year-olds are paired in an English class to co-write a contemporary Romeo and Juliet. Rose Sumner has just withdrawn from her private school in Coral Gables. Her father, recently indicted for a forty-one million dollar Ponzi scheme, will be in federal prison until she is thirty-five. Javier Delacroix is the quiet boy in the back row at Doctors Charter School. His father works nights at a hotel on Collins Avenue.
They do not know how to write thirteen-year-olds in love. So they text each other as the characters. For a week, Rose becomes Maya and Javier becomes Ben, and the messages between them begin to generate the script. They begin to generate something else, too.
Maya and Ben is a quiet, precisely observed story about class, silence, family, and the particular distance between what young people say and what they mean. Set against the specific textures of Miami, from Coral Gables to El Portal to Little Haiti to Collins Avenue, it belongs to the tradition of contemporary American short fiction about young people at moments of private reckoning.
Judd Shapiro is a retired English teacher and writer who lives in Miami. He is the author of the short story collections Detours (2025) and Passage (2026). Maya and Ben is a standalone piece published as a chapbook in advance of his third collection.
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