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Florida
by Lauren Groff · 2018
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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 edges 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.…
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"The stories in Lauren Groff’s Florida are visions of women at the ends of things, in trouble, at their breaking points. Her language is, as always, gorgeous and precise. Her ability to map the inner contours of characters who seem to exist entirely in extremis — and, almost entirely, within a fragile shell of feigned competence and normalcy — is remarkable. Her Florida is a frightening place that bends (solely through the eyes and experiences of her characters) into a discomfortingly modern Southern Gothic tradition, offering up stories that are all haunted by fear, by violence (either natural or man-made) and by the idea that life is measured in the ration of misery that you take — and the grace with which you suffer it."
"Writing that makes me see what the characters see. Like a story in Lauren Groff's "Florida," which puts you inside a house with a woman who rides out a hurricane alone."