Lauren Groff's Reading List

"I reread Jean Stafford's "The Mountain Lion," which is one of the strangest and angriest novels of the 20th century."

"a brilliant poetry collection playing so cunningly with pop culture that it reminded me that pop culture is astonishingly deep and fascinating."

"I read "Middlemarch," by George Eliot, at least once a year because I want to curl up inside Eliot's warm intelligence."

"Toni Cade Bambara's "Gorilla, My Love" blew my mind. It was one of the first 20th-century short story collections I ever read, as well as the first to show me how much joy and playfulness there can be with the contemporary form."

"Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's "The Yearling" is one of the best books ever written about Florida; adults don't read it often nowadays because at some point it was miscategorized as a children's book."

"I reread the work of Jean Craighead George, in particular "My Side of the Mountain" and "Julie of the Wolves.""

"My sister, a professional triathlete, is a huge reader, and I sent her Maggie Nelson's "Bluets." She ate it up."

"The great Jean Rhys made his villainy wickedly explicit in "Wide Sargasso Sea.""

"When my mother came home with a freshly published hardcover of "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" when I was 7, it was my first encounter with realism... and that's when I got the idea that I didn't just want to read books, I wanted to write them."