Lauren Groff

Harvard Book Store welcomes celebrated writer LAUREN GROFF—author of National Book Award finalist Fates and Furies—for a discussion of her latest book of short stories, Florida.

About Florida

In her vigorous and moving new book, Lauren Groff brings her electric storytelling and intelligence to a world in which storms, snakes, and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life, but the greater threats and mysteries are of a human, emotional, and psychological nature. Among those navigating it all are a resourceful pair of abandoned sisters; a lonely boy, grown up; a restless, childless couple, a searching, homeless woman; and an unforgettable, recurring character—a steely and conflicted wife and mother.

The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope, and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive. Startling, precise, and affecting, Florida is a magnificent achievement.

Praise

"Superlative collection—seriously, there’s not a dud in the bunch . . . Groff is an extra terrific writer, as ever . . . Having followed an astonishing, astonishingly accessible novel with such an outstanding, accessible collection, Groff is surely poised to topple the tiny monkeys in charge of deciding that the perceived realm of the feminine isn’t sufficiently deep." —The Boston Globe

"Taken together, the stories have the feel of autobiography, although, as in a Salvador Dali painting, their emotional disclosures are encrypted in phantasmagoria . . . The sentences indigenous to Florida are gorgeously weird and limber." —The New Yorker

"Brooding, inventive and often moving short stories . . . In Groff's trademark zigzagging storytelling style, revelations ricochet between pages—and sometimes even within single sentences . . . Groff, through her own acrobatic style, attests to the benefits of a firm grounding in grammar and vocabulary. Lots of things go south fast in the stories collected in Florida—like marriages, careers and the weather—but throughout, Groff's gifts as a writer just keep soaring higher and higher." —NPR Fresh Air 

"Subversive, but quietly; it captures what’s mysterious about the inevitable, what’s bizarre about the inescapable . . . these narratives of young families, divorced couples, and unconventional women vibrate with something new . . . The rains in Florida are biblical, to say the least. The margins between earthen and celestial routinely dissolve . . . Florida suggests that the relationship between humans and our planet—that home none of us chose—transcends the power struggle of dominance and submission." —The Paris Review