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Lauren Groff

Autor(a) de Fates and Furies

32+ Works 11,190 Membros 654 Críticas 21 Favorited

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

Fates and Furies (2015) 3,602 exemplares
The Monsters of Templeton (2008) 2,807 exemplares
Matrix (2021) 1,428 exemplares
Arcadia (2012) 1,397 exemplares
Florida (2018) 1,073 exemplares
The Vaster Wilds (2023) 328 exemplares
Boca Raton (2018) 42 exemplares
The Midnight Zone 8 exemplares
Monsters of Templeton 4 exemplares
The Masters Review: 2012 (2012) — Editor — 4 exemplares
Ghosts and Empties 2 exemplares

Associated Works

The Best American Short Stories 2007 (2007) — Contribuidor — 815 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2010 (2010) — Contribuidor — 405 exemplares
100 Years of The Best American Short Stories (2015) — Contribuidor — 266 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2014 (2014) — Contribuidor — 262 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2016 (2016) — Contribuidor — 248 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2017 (2017) — Contribuidor — 171 exemplares
The Monster's Corner (2011) — Contribuidor — 158 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2022 (2022) — Contribuidor — 81 exemplares
Granta 139: Best of Young American Novelists (2017) — Contribuidor — 69 exemplares
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (2011) — Contribuidor — 62 exemplares
Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us (2021) — Contribuidor — 58 exemplares
Collected Stories - Everyman (2020) — Introdução — 46 exemplares
The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story (2021) — Contribuidor — 43 exemplares
The Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2022 (2022) — Contribuidor — 26 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2023 (2023) — Contribuidor — 16 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Membros

Críticas

Florida has never seemed like a defined, real place to me. My early impressions of it came from my father's Pogo books, and from beautiful yet sinister storm sets in old black and white films. Then came the fight over Elián González, and hanging chads. All very interesting, but not enough to get any sort of cogent idea of the place. Pictures of elderly citizens flooding it annually in winter in their gated communities, along with real floods from hurricanes don't help.

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:
And now she is crying.
I'm not crying, she tells the dog, but the dog sighs deeply.
The dog needs to take a little break from her.
The dog stands and goes inside and crawls under the baby grand piano that she bought long ago from a lonely old lady, a piano that nobody plays.
A lonely old piano.
She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the "Moonlight Sonata".
She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures in reading.
.
In another story, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners", a deaf man out rowing loses his oars and drifts helplessly.
The water thickly hid its danger, but he knew what was there. There were alligators, their knobby eyes even now watching him. He'd seen one with his binoculars from his bedroom the other day that was at least fourteen feet long. He felt it somewhere nearby now. And though this was no longer prairie, there were still a few snakes, cottonmouth, copperheads, pygmies under the leaf rot at the edge of the lake. There was the water itself, superheated until it hosted flagellates that enter the nose and infect the brain, an infinity of the minuscule eating away. There was the burning sun above and the mosquitoes feeding on his blood. There was the silence. He wouldn't swim in this terrifying mess.

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)
 
Assinalado
SassyLassy | 59 outras críticas | Nov 24, 2023 |
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)
 
Assinalado
OnniAdda | 59 outras críticas | Nov 22, 2023 |
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.
 
Assinalado
decaturmamaof2 | 17 outras críticas | Nov 22, 2023 |
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)
½
 
Assinalado
allthegoodbooks | 17 outras críticas | Nov 16, 2023 |

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Associated Authors

Julia Whelan Narrator
Will Damron Narrator
Ann Marie Lee Narrator
Beth White Cover artist
Adjoa Andoh Narrator
Andrew Garnan Narrator

Estatísticas

Obras
32
Also by
19
Membros
11,190
Popularidade
#2,110
Avaliação
½ 3.7
Críticas
654
ISBN
195
Línguas
19
Marcado como favorito
21
Pedras de toque
528

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