The Elysian Fields: or, How to Live Forever in Under Six Hundred Square Feet

By Jeffery Beach

When a faceless real estate company tries to buy out the Elysian Fields, a modest Ohio senior living complex named, with more irony than anyone intended, after the Greek paradise of the heroic dead, its forty-some tenants discover they have exactly one weapon left: each other. Told partly through the wry, deadpan voice of the building itself, The Elysian Fields follows a sprawling, unmistakably American cast, a Mexican-American postal supervisor, a Black Baptist preacher losing words to a small stroke, a Holocaust survivor, a Japanese-American man who watched hawks from behind Manzanar's barbed wire as a child, a late-in-life gay couple finally living openly, a Black trans jazz pianist, and the overworked staff who hold it all together, as they band together to save their home from a rooftop-dog-park-and-co-working-lounge redevelopment. Along the way there are motorcycle repairs and casserole diplomacy, a runaway three-legged dog, a heart attack, a funeral, a wedding, and a city council meeting that goes very badly for the developer, all handled with the same unsentimental tenderness: nothing here, not death, not memory loss, not loneliness, gets softened, and nothing gets treated as more or less than what it actually is. It's a comic novel about what a community actually costs to build, one shared casserole and one forest-green banner at a time, and about what it means to grow old in a country that has gotten very good at making things convenient and not especially good at making anybody feel necessary.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9QBPTC7
• ISBN13: 9798188271480
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"