Lauren Groff
Autor(a) de Fates and Furies
About the Author
Lauren Groff graduated from Amherst College and received an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her books include The Monsters of Templeton, Delicate Edible Birds, and Fates and Furies. Arcadia won of the Medici Book Club Prize. Her fiction has also won the Paul Bowles Prize mostrar mais for Fiction, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Tin House, One Story, McSweeney's, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three editions of the Best American Short Stories. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos
Image credit: Lucy Schaeffer
Obras por Lauren Groff
The Midnight Zone 8 exemplares
Monsters of Templeton 4 exemplares
Delicate Edible Birds [short story] 4 exemplares
Die weite Wildnis: Roman | New York Times Bestseller | »Ein hinreißender Roman.« Die Zeit 3 exemplares
Ghosts and Empties 2 exemplares
The Wind [short story] 2 exemplares
Dogs Go Wolf 1 exemplar
De weidse wildernis 1 exemplar
What's the Time, Mr Wolf? 1 exemplar
The Wife of the Dictator [short story] 1 exemplar
Birdie 1 exemplar
Fugue [short story] 1 exemplar
Watershed [short story] 1 exemplar
Blythe [short story] 1 exemplar
Majorette [short story] 1 exemplar
L. Debard and Aliette [short story] 1 exemplar
Lucky Chow Fun [short story] 1 exemplar
American Short Fiction Volume 18 Issue 60 1 exemplar
Groff Lauren 1 exemplar
Sir Fleeting [short story] 1 exemplar
Groff, Lauren Archive 1 exemplar
Associated Works
Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases (2020) — Contribuidor — 163 exemplares
McSweeney's Issue 49 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern): Cover Stories (2017) — Contribuidor — 52 exemplares
Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone's First Decade (2014) — Contribuidor — 12 exemplares
The Second Shelf: A Quarterly of Rare Books & Words by Women (Issue 1, Autumn 2018) — Contribuidor — 3 exemplares
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Data de nascimento
- 1978-07-23
- Sexo
- female
- Nacionalidade
- USA
- Local de nascimento
- Cooperstown, New York, USA
- Locais de residência
- Gainesville, Florida, USA
- Educação
- Amherst College
University of Wisconsin-Madison - Ocupações
- short story writer
novelist - Agente
- Bill Clegg (Burnes & Clegg, Inc.)
Membros
Críticas
I really wanted to like this collection of short stories based on Florida life because of the writing alone,but it was really dull and dry. Only a hand full of stories stood out, for instance,the story about the woman with her two boys in the cabin and other about a family in France. Nothing in particular was really memorable about any of the stories and that's the problem. Nothing was distinct or unique every story had the same southern melancholy vibe that quickly became tedious overtime. The narration wasn't terrible it just lacked color or vibrancy,it was kind of monotone. Overall it wss just meh… (mais)
Poetry.
The story of a journey through the wilderness of colonial-era North America.
Also meditation on the journey of understanding. Of learning. Of seeing.
The story of a journey through the wilderness of colonial-era North America.
Also meditation on the journey of understanding. Of learning. Of seeing.
When I got to the end of the book, thought I had missed something. Described on the front as an adventure and a mystery, I feel this might be misleading as there is very little plot and a lot of journey.
A servant, unnamed by the narrator, escapes Jamestown in America where everyone is dying. Brought over on a ship by a family to start a new life, it comes as a shock to recognise that everyone is running or hiding from something they have done or are and that it is hardly civilisation.
It is gradually revealed through blood on her hands, that the girl has killed and so is on the run for she knows that they will send someone 'bad' after her to show the rest of the colony that they can not steal and get away with it. She runs and runs into the vast wilds and woods and as she runs she is chased by memories of her life, her treatment by men, the wickedness of the man her mistress married, the death of the child, Bess, she looked after, Native Americans and wolves and bears. She is chased by fairy tales and stories and the unknown.
We get every detail about the food she finds and the effect it has on her guts, where and on what she sleeps, the pain she is in as fever spreads throughout her body. For someone who seems to be noticing her body and some of her environment, she is also strangely un-noticing. She is not heading North, as she hoped, but West - the first of many to do so, she doesn't notice the nuts under the trees that would sustain her, she doesn't realise that the forests have been burned by Native Americans in order to access food more easily. She is laughed at by Native American children as she is swept by them in a boat that is soon to sink and it is easy to see that she represents the settlers moving onto a land they don't know and observe closely enough and move through destroying everything in their path. When asked by the voice in her head if she knew the 'scale of the place', she replies
No, but surely it must be smaller than my own far greater country across the waters, where each field is so thick with legend and myth and ancient battles that one step is not merely in space, unlike this new world, but also through layers of time. Here there is nothing, only land, all the earth and mountains and trees remain innocent of story. This place is itself a parchment yet to be written upon.
p9
At this point in the book I was begging Groff to allow a First Nation family to find the girl and nurse her back to health (I was thinking of the Last of the Mohicans here) but that isn't what Groff has in store for this girl. She goes on and on and so does the reader, if they have the endurance. At last she finds a place to stop, she is too ill go on any further, and builds a stone cabin to live in until she can no longer.
And at the end, this God that she has followed and listened to the whole time, is lost.
. . . for the blight of the english will come to this remoteness as well. It will spread into this land and infect this land and devour the people who were here first: it will slaughter them, diminsh them. The hunger inside the god of my people can only be sated by domination. They will dominate until there is nothing left.
p242
The writing to describe the vast wilderness is poetic for there are a lot of trees and streams and snow at the start of the escape.
Glory pulsed in her gut: she, a nobody, a nothing, going farther than any man of europe had yet gone in this place so new to their eyes.
p168
I can see that this might end up as a bit of a marmite book. In one sense it is a tour-de-force of the vastness and the wilderness out there and in the plot sense it is a complete let down. I am not sure which side of the fence I come down on and so will sit firmly on it.… (mais)
A servant, unnamed by the narrator, escapes Jamestown in America where everyone is dying. Brought over on a ship by a family to start a new life, it comes as a shock to recognise that everyone is running or hiding from something they have done or are and that it is hardly civilisation.
It is gradually revealed through blood on her hands, that the girl has killed and so is on the run for she knows that they will send someone 'bad' after her to show the rest of the colony that they can not steal and get away with it. She runs and runs into the vast wilds and woods and as she runs she is chased by memories of her life, her treatment by men, the wickedness of the man her mistress married, the death of the child, Bess, she looked after, Native Americans and wolves and bears. She is chased by fairy tales and stories and the unknown.
We get every detail about the food she finds and the effect it has on her guts, where and on what she sleeps, the pain she is in as fever spreads throughout her body. For someone who seems to be noticing her body and some of her environment, she is also strangely un-noticing. She is not heading North, as she hoped, but West - the first of many to do so, she doesn't notice the nuts under the trees that would sustain her, she doesn't realise that the forests have been burned by Native Americans in order to access food more easily. She is laughed at by Native American children as she is swept by them in a boat that is soon to sink and it is easy to see that she represents the settlers moving onto a land they don't know and observe closely enough and move through destroying everything in their path. When asked by the voice in her head if she knew the 'scale of the place', she replies
No, but surely it must be smaller than my own far greater country across the waters, where each field is so thick with legend and myth and ancient battles that one step is not merely in space, unlike this new world, but also through layers of time. Here there is nothing, only land, all the earth and mountains and trees remain innocent of story. This place is itself a parchment yet to be written upon.
p9
At this point in the book I was begging Groff to allow a First Nation family to find the girl and nurse her back to health (I was thinking of the Last of the Mohicans here) but that isn't what Groff has in store for this girl. She goes on and on and so does the reader, if they have the endurance. At last she finds a place to stop, she is too ill go on any further, and builds a stone cabin to live in until she can no longer.
And at the end, this God that she has followed and listened to the whole time, is lost.
. . . for the blight of the english will come to this remoteness as well. It will spread into this land and infect this land and devour the people who were here first: it will slaughter them, diminsh them. The hunger inside the god of my people can only be sated by domination. They will dominate until there is nothing left.
p242
The writing to describe the vast wilderness is poetic for there are a lot of trees and streams and snow at the start of the escape.
Glory pulsed in her gut: she, a nobody, a nothing, going farther than any man of europe had yet gone in this place so new to their eyes.
p168
I can see that this might end up as a bit of a marmite book. In one sense it is a tour-de-force of the vastness and the wilderness out there and in the plot sense it is a complete let down. I am not sure which side of the fence I come down on and so will sit firmly on it.… (mais)
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Prémios
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Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 32
- Also by
- 19
- Membros
- 11,190
- Popularidade
- #2,110
- Avaliação
- 3.7
- Críticas
- 654
- ISBN
- 195
- Línguas
- 19
- Marcado como favorito
- 21
- Pedras de toque
- 528
I knew Lauren Groff's name from positive reviews on LT, so when I saw this beautiful looking book in the store, I picked it up. The glorious beast on the cover positively shimmered. The Washington Post blurb on the back cover told me that Groff "stakes her claim to being Florida's unofficial poet laureate, as Joan Didion was for California". Well, if she could write like Joan Didion, I had to read her.
There are eleven stories here, of which nine take place in Florida. While each centres around people, it is Florida that is the real protagonist. Unpredictable, menacing, there is a real sense of danger, whether in town or in the country. Feral cats, mould, rot, insects, sinkholes, torrential rain, wind, snakes, not to mention alligators: all can damage the soul as well as the body. Being alone turns to debilitating loneliness:.
In another story, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners", a deaf man out rowing loses his oars and drifts helplessly.
Abandonment is a theme in this collection. Buildings, careers, friends, partners, parents, even children, are left behind. In the final story, "Yport", Florida itself is left behind as a woman flees summer there to research a novel about Guy de Maupassant. Normandy is a complete contrast to Florida. Even though her two children are with her, loneliness still haunts her. In the end she realizes, Solitude is danger for a working mind. We need to keep around us people who think and speak.
When we are lonely for a long time, we people the void with phantoms. Although she adds de Maupassant said this in "Le Horla", perhaps this is Groff's message. In Florida, the phantoms are all too real.
As for me, Florida remains just as unknowable.… (mais)