Brawler - by Lauren Groff (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region-from New England to Florida to California-these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans' dark and light angels"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A stunning, fierce collection from a master of the short story and one of the most important writers of our time

Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff's electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region -- from New England to Florida to California -- these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans' dark and light angels.

"In every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death," one character tells us. Among those we see caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling, a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult, a mother blinded by the loss of her family, and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by the double edges of other peoples' good intentions, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.

Precise, surprising, and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated, sometimes heartbreaking turning points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and what it takes to survive.

Review Quotes

Praise for Brawler

"In the coiling dread and frank feminism of her work, this incandescent author makes clear with her newest fiction why she won the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. This audacious collection surprises readers with the vivid lives few of us notice."--Kirkus (starred)

"A gorgeous collection about families transformed by desperate circumstances...Groff sketches her characters with scalpel-like precision...Each of these heartbreaking tales will linger in the reader's mind." --Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Thrillingly complex, wickedly strong girls and women populate the worlds of Groff's third story collection. In total command of her characters' nuances and the gray space they find themselves in, Groff shares brief, cryptic yet revealing notes about each story at book's end, for the cherry on top." --Booklist (starred)

Praise for Florida

"Groff is a great storyteller. . . . Florida is restorative fiction for these urgent times. Its final gestures, even the most ominous . . . lean toward love and the promise of good people, in not just this state but the world." --The New York Times

"Groff's 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." --NPR

"Groff's incomparable prose pulsates with peril; its beauty, like that of the titular state itself, lies in a certain wild lushness." --Financial Times

"Groff's writing is marvelous, her insights keen, each story a glittering, encrusted treasure hauled from the deep." --The Economist

"[Groff] is one of the best writers in the United States, and her prizewinning stories reverberate long after they are read. " --Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Author

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and two other story collections, including Florida. Winner of The Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, she has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and her books have been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx.