Lauren Groff

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About Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff is the author of four novels: MATRIX, forthcoming in September 2021, and the National Book Award Finalist and winner of the American Booksellers Association's Fiction prize, FATES AND FURIES; as well as ARCADIA and THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON. Her story collections include FLORIDA, winner of The Story Prize and finalist for the National Book Award, and DELICATE EDIBLE BIRDS. She has been twice been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, as well as for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Orange Prize for New Writers. She was a Guggenheim fellow and was named one of Granta's 2017 Best Young American Novelists. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's, in five Best American Short Stories anthologies, and her books have been published in over 30 languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.
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Books By Lauren Groff
WINNER OF THE 2022 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2021
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, The Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Vulture, Marie Claire, Vox, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more!
“A relentless exhibition of Groff’s freakish talent. In just over 250 pages, she gives us a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell .” – USA Today
“An electric reimagining . . . feminist, sensual . . . unforgettable.” – O, The Oprah Magazine
“Thrilling and heartbreaking.” –Time Magazine
“[A] page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her.” –New York Times
One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.
Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.
At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?
Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.
WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE
ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
From the universally acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies and Matrix
Florida is a "superlative" book (Boston Globe), "frequently funny" (San Francisco Chronicle), "brooding, inventive and often moving" (NPR Fresh Air) --as Groff is recognized as "Florida's unofficial poet laureate, as Joan Didion was for California." (Washington Post)
In her thrilling new book, Lauren Groff brings the reader into a physical world that is at once domestic and wild—a place where the hazards of the natural world lie waiting to pounce, yet the greatest threats and mysteries are still of an emotional, psychological nature. A family retreat can be derailed by a prowling panther, or by a sexual secret. Among those navigating this place 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.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, TIME, THE SEATTLE TIMES, MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE, SLATE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, KIRKUS, AND MANY MORE
“Lauren Groff is a writer of rare gifts, and Fates and Furies is an unabashedly ambitious novel that delivers – with comedy, tragedy, well-deployed erudition and unmistakable glimmers of brilliance throughout.” —The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
From the award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Florida and Matrix, an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception.
Fates and Furies is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation. A dazzling examination of a marriage, it is also a portrait of creative partnership written by one of the best writers of her generation.
Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.
At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. With stunning revelations and multiple threads, and in prose that is vibrantly alive and original, Groff delivers a deeply satisfying novel about love, art, creativity, and power that is unlike anything that has come before it. Profound, surprising, propulsive, and emotionally riveting, it stirs both the mind and the heart.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"Timeless and vast... The raw beauty of Ms. Groff's prose is one of the best things about Arcadia. But it is by no means this book's only kind of splendor."---Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Even the most incidental details vibrate with life Arcadia wends a harrowing path back to a fragile, lovely place you can believe in."---Ron Charles, The Washington Post
In the fields of western New York State in the 1970s, a few dozen idealists set out to live off the land, founding a commune centered on the grounds of a decaying mansion called Arcadia House. Arcadia follows this romantic utopian dream from its hopeful start through its heyday. Arcadia's inhabitants include Handy, the charismatic leader; his wife, Astrid, a midwife; Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah's only child, Bit. While Arcadia rises and falls, Bit, too, ages and changes. He falls in love with Helle, Handy's lovely, troubled daughter. And eventually he must face the world beyond Arcadia.
In Arcadia, Groff displays her literary gifts to stunning effect.
"Fascinating."---People (****)
"It's not possible to write any better without showing off."---Richard Russo, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls
"Dazzling."---Vogue
In "Sir Fleeting," a Midwestern farm girl on her honeymoon in Argentina falls into lifelong lust for a French playboy. In "Blythe," an attorney who has become a stay-at-home mother takes a night class in poetry and meets another full-time mother, one whose charismatic brilliance changes everything. In "The Wife of the Dictator," that eponymous wife ("brought back . . . from [the dictator's] last visit to America") grows more desperately, menacingly isolated every day. In "Delicate Edible Birds," a group of war correspondents-a lone, high-spirited woman among them-falls sudden prey to a brutal farmer while fleeing Nazis in the French countryside. In "Lucky Chow Fun," Groff returns us to Templeton, the setting of her first book, for revelations about the darkness within even that idyllic small town.
In some of these stories, enormous changes happen in an instant. In others, transformations occur across a lifetime--or several lifetimes.
Throughout the collection, Groff displays particular and vivid preoccupations. Crime is a motif--sex crimes, a possible murder, crimes of the heart. Love troubles recur; they're in every story--love in alcoholism, in adultery, in a flood, even in the great flu epidemic of 1918. Some of the love has depths, which are understood too late; some of the love is shallow, and also understood too late. And mastery is a theme--Groff's women swim and baton twirl, become poets, or try and try again to achieve the inner strength to exercise personal freedom.
Overall, these stories announce a notable new literary master. Dazzlingly original and confident, Delicate Edible Birds further solidifies Groff's reputation as one of the foremost talents of her generation.
Tout n'est pas si facile dans l'" État ensoleillé " qu'est la Floride. Derrière les images de carte postale se cachent des situations souvent ambigües comme l'attestent les nouvelles de ce recueil.
On y croise une famille dont la vie se voit brutalement perturbée par la présence hypothétique d'une panthère, une femme qui, durant une tempête, reçoit la visite de fantômes venus de son passé, deux petites filles abandonnées sur une île qui doivent réinventer leur vie à l'état sauvage, une écrivaine floridienne de passage en Normandie pour écrire sur Maupassant, ou encore une femme qui décide soudain de changer de vie et de devenir vagabonde...
La faune et la flore, les ouragans déchaînés propres à la Floride influent sur le destin de tous ces personnages. Mais Lauren Groff semble nous dire ceci : les menaces les plus dangereuses, et les perturbations les plus puissantes viennent rarement de l'extérieur, mais des recoins les plus isolés de notre intimité.
Traduit de l'anglais (États-Unis) par Carine Chichereau.
Cuando la naturaleza se vuelve loca, el corazón también.
Ganadora del Story Prize, finalista del National Book Award y uno de los Mejores Libros del Año según The New Yorker y Time Magazine.
En un mundo en el que el clima se ha vuelto impredecible, un lugar a la vez domesticado y salvaje en el que acechan los peligros feroces de la naturaleza, las mayores amenazas siguen siendo emocionales y psicológicas. Un refugio familiar puede ser destruido por una pantera que merodea o por un secreto sexual.
Dos hermanas abandonadas, un hombre que crece rodeado de serpientes cazadas por su padre, una pareja inquieta y sin hijos, y una mujer casada y desorientada son algunos de los protagonistas de estos once inolvidables relatos. El estado de Florida se transforma en una metáfora de todo el planeta, un laboratorio donde explorar las relaciones amorosas, la soledad, la ira, la familia y el paso del tiempo.
Críticas:
«Groff ha nacido para escribir historias y lo hace con maestría. [...] Largas o cortas, esto es literatura y de la buena.»
Elena Méndez, La Voz de Galicia
«En los próximos años veremos sin duda a más narradores introducir la angustia medio ambiental en sus ficciones y habrá que recordar que Lauren Groff lo hizo antes y como corresponde, integrando ese estupor en la fibra de lo cotidiano.»
B. Gómez Urzaiz, La Vanguardia
«Florida es una maravilla en la que se despliega majestuosa una narradora desatada. Sin las ataduras que impone una novela, Groff estira y encoge sus relatos cortos y zarandea al lector. Imaginativa, fantástica, en cada uno de ellos parece querer alcanzar las fronteras de su propia literatura.»
Roberto Moro, Libros y Literatura
«Abundan las mujeres hechizadas y madres que se sienten huérfanas de sí mismas casi en trance por el latido de junglas y la atracción de pantanos donde, inevitablemente, sonríen los lagartos y muestran los colmillos las panteras, flotan los espectros y giran los huracanes, y florecen las neurosis varias en un mundo que parece siempre mojándose los pies en las orillas del Apocalipsis climático y existencial. Podría reprochársele a Groff el pretender hacer suyo un territorio que, indiscutiblemente, le pertenece a la mayor y enorme y muy influyente Joy Williams. Pero las primeras páginas ya la ubican como una cuentista de gran calibre capaz de hacer eso que muy pocos son capaces de conseguir dentro del género: auténticas novelas comprimidas.»
Rodrigo Fresán, ABC Cultural
«Un amplio abanico de personajes, pueblos, décadas e incluso siglos, y en todas [las historias] Florida opera como centro gravitatorio.»
Qué Leer
«Hay mucho de David Lynch en el paisaje floridiano de Groff. [...] Su escritura es maravillosa; su visión, perspicaz; cada historia es un tesoro reluciente que viene arrastrado desde las profundidades.»
The Economist
«Los lectores casi pueden sentir los mosquitos zumbando en sus cuellos. [...] Los depredadores muerden, los huracanes destruyen y la naturaleza no perdona.»
The Wall Street Journal
«Una escritora sobresaliente.
Traduit de l'anglais (États-Unis) par Carine Chichereau.
" Le mariage est un tissu de mensonges. Gentils, pour la plupart. D'omissions. Si tu devais exprimer ce que tu penses au quotidien de ton conjoint, tu réduirais tout en miettes. Elle n'a jamais menti. Elle s'est contentée de ne pas en parler. "
Ils se rencontrent à l'université. Ils se marient très vite. Nous sommes en 1991. À vingt-deux ans, Lotto et Mathilde
sont beaux, séduisants, follement amoureux, et semblent promis à un avenir radieux. Dix ans plus tard, Lotto est devenu
un dramaturge au succès planétaire, et Mathilde, dans l'ombre, l'a toujours soutenu. Le couple qu'ils forment est l'image-type d'un partenariat réussi.
Mais les histoires d'amour parfaites cachent souvent des secrets qu'il vaudrait mieux taire. Au terme de ce roman, la véritable raison d'être de ce couple sans accrocs réserve bien des surprises.
A teenage girl in Connecticut driven to near delirium over her burgeoning sexuality. A twenty-something New Yorker transplanted to a small Virginia community who boldly befriends the town pariah. A New England widow in search of alcohol and excitement while babysitting her grandson. A Maryland socialite who has built a secret bomb shelter that becomes the center of her imaginative life.
These are some of the characters who inhabit Nancy Hale’s lush fiction. Haunting, vivid, and wonderfully subversive, Hale’s stories typically concern women recognizable to all of us—sometimes fragile, possibly wicked, deceptively ordinary, navigating their way uncertainly through life.
Nancy Hale was one of the most accomplished short story artists of her era, winner of ten O. Henry Awards and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1960s. But by the time of her death in 1988, this remarkable writer, so far ahead of her time in her depiction of complex women, was largely forgotten. Now Lauren Groff reintroduces this modern master with a selection of twenty-five of her best stories— brilliant short fiction that encompasses childhood and adolescence, marriage and motherhood, desire and infidelity, madness and memory.
Where the Light Falls reveals Hale as a gifted stylist—a painter in light and shadow—and an acute observer of modern American life.
«El drama de monjas medievales que no sabías que necesitabas» (Vulture): un retrato de la indomable María de Francia, por la autora que deslumbró a Barack Obama y a la crítica mundial, ganadora de los premios Paul Bowles, PEN/O. Henry y Pushcart.
Uno de los mejores libros del año según The Times
Descendiente de una larga dinastía de guerreras y cruzadas, Marie es demasiado ruda y rebelde para la vida palaciega, por lo que acaba siendo expulsada de la corte y enviada a los lodazales de Inglaterra para que asuma el rol de priora de una abadía venida a menos. Al llegar, encuentra un panorama desolador donde reinan la inanición y el chismorreo. Marie añora la comodidad de la corte francesa, y también a su amante secreta, Cecily. Sin embargo, al poco tiempo se dará cuenta de que sus nuevas obligaciones le otorgan más poder del que jamás habría imaginado, un acceso a los conocimientos sobre plantas medicinales y su propio sello de lacre para la correspondencia, que le permitirá cartearse confidencialmente con quien quiera.
Tras Florida, finalista del National Book Award, Lauren Groff vuelve a sorprendernos con el retrato de María de Francia, un personaje fascinante y poco conocido de la historia que se ha convertido en icono femenino.
La crítica ha dicho...
«Ambientar una historia feminista en el siglo XII no es tarea fácil, [...] pero Matrix es una novela inspiradora que demuestra el poder que han sabido ejercer las mujeres. [...] Un dominio de la palabra y un ritmo magistrales, [...] una narración altamente adictiva».
NPR
«Una celebración bellamente escrita del deseo y la creatividad femeninos, con una heroína formidable».
The Guardian
«Un libro inolvidable, extático, resplandeciente, herético».
USA Today
«Una recreación eléctrica, feminista, sensual y magistral de la mano de un personaje memorable».
Oprah Magazine
«Groff ha nacido para escribir historias y lo hace con maestría».
Elena Méndez, La Voz de Galicia
«Una escritora talentosa, capaz de una hábil pirotecnia a la altura de los desafíos que plantea».
The New York Times Book Review
«El trabajo más atrevido de la autora: [...] su suntuosa pero fresca narración se abre camino por una abadía medieval en busca de violencia, humor, empoderamiento y espiritualidad, y forja algo convincente, extraño y reconocible para el ojo moderno».
Philadelphia Inquirer
«Una obra audaz y emocionante que pone de manifiesto la imaginación salvaje y sin límites de Groff».
Star Tribune
«Una obra ingeniosa e inteligente que perdurará».
The Boston Globe
«De lectura obligada».
The Washington Post
«Páginas incandescentes. [...] Una obra brillante de imaginación y talento».
Esquire
A mother’s latent fears rise as relentlessly as the Florida seas in a startling story of a planet, and an imagination, under pressure, by the New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies.
During an eco-friendly cleanup at the beach, Ange finds something horrifying in the brush. The sickening, heartbreaking evidence of an irreversibly changing earth triggers dread about the future for her daughter. But as reasoned worries slide into paranoia, reality itself begins to untether. For Ange, there may be no stepping back from the destructive darkness of her sleepless nights.
Lauren Groff’s Boca Raton is part of Warmer, a collection of seven visions of a conceivable tomorrow by today’s most thought-provoking authors. Alarming, inventive, intimate, and frightening, each story can be read, or listened to, in a single breathtaking sitting.
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