DAN REITER
Dan Reiter lives on a dissolving barrier island in Florida. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Surfer's Journal, American Short Fiction, and other intrepid venues. His debut collection of surf writing––On a Rising Swell––released in 2025.
About
Dan Reiter
Dan Reiter is a surfer, author, and a general contractor. He was born in Montreal in the time of Lévesque and moved to Florida at the age of three. He lives in Cocoa Beach.
Book Announcement
On a Rising Swell
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2025.
Winner of the Florida Historical Society's 2025 Charlton Tebeau Award.
Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Winner, 2025
A high-speed glide through Florida surf culture and a deep dive into the lore of a classic surfing destination.
"A wonderfully colorful and inviting paean to Cocoa Beach surfing... a surfing classic fit to sit beside John Long’s The Big Drop (1999) and William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days (2015)." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Ideal for the surfer fanatic or even the surf-curious... intimate and charged with life... in brief essays, interviews, and rhapsodies... Reiter illuminates surfing’s ancient origins and modern history, especially along this strip of the Atlantic that has inspired both board innovations and world-class surfers." —Publishers Weekly (editor's pick)
"Goes far beyond simple research and delves not only into the fascinating history of the Space Coast's surfing culture, but into the very zeitgeist of the sport itself." —Matt George, author of In Deep: The Collected Surf Writings
“Every so often a writer bubbles from the substrata fully formed, handily entering what fellow surf scribes call the ‘meat eater’s club.’ This new Dan Reiter offering serves as an Exhibit A.” —Scott Hulet, creative director, The Surfer’s Journal
Podcasts & Interviews
Fiction - short stories
Journals & Magazines
While We Can
When Abigail stretched out her arms and chirped in her sweet, piping voice, "We're all going to die!" we couldn't help but laugh...
Hallandale Beach, 1987
Dan's most recent short story was published in the 20th anniversary edition of Bellevue Literary Review.
Les Dansants
If we were not so young and beautiful as we’d been in those years before the babies, at least we were beginning to look less tired...
Dance of the Old Century
He grew a beard some years into the new century, after beards came into fashion among young men but before they went out again. This was the winter of the Paris attacks...
The Heiress’s Education
She arrived under fog of epidural at the culmination of a successful mating season between a hedge-fund magnate and an East Hampton catalogue model...
Flood
They talked about writing important things. Some wrote very popular things and could talk so as to make the very popular things they wrote seem important. They winnowed. They channeled. They allowed for marginalia...
Socrates & the County School Board
If it pleases the Board, I prefer to investigate this subject collectively. There is one question in particular, a most vexing question about the nature of the testing process, which has been dogging my mind...
Non-Fiction
Essays & Articles
Kelly Slater Takes Pipeline
On February 5, 2022, the world’s most recognizable wave––the Banzai Pipeline––was sucking in long, liquid breaths and exhaling 10-foot sapphire cylinders over the shallow reef...
Writing (and Riding) the Waves
Increasingly, and in reputable circles, I’ve heard the phrase “surf literature” spoken out loud, and without a trace of irony...
Scott Hulet’s Flow Violento
Equal parts T.S. Eliot, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jon Krakauer, Hulet stirs in wit, jazz-improvisational style, and a gift for aphorism that has become manna to the waterman faithful...
Noseride Obsessive
Every time I hear the 1962 version of the bossa nova song “Desafinado,” my mind summons a vision of a willowy, teenaged Joel Tudor noseriding at Ehukai Beach Park...
Three Generations
This all happened to successful, educated people, in modern times, in one of the most advanced nations of the civilized world. And when Hitler’s men forced my grandparents onto a death train to the Belzec concentration camp...
The Space Coast
From the Ancient Past to the Modern Era, Cocoa Beach and the wider environs of Brevard County have maintained a fully innate surf identity...
Guns, Surfers, and Pop Sculpture
The wind tumbles in from the Atlantic, frays the thinning edges of the cheap Trump flags, bends down an alleyway, and rides in through the high corrugated doors of Bruce Reynolds’ workshop....