Author Lauren Groff for her latest book, “FLORIDA” in Athens, GA this month.
BOOK SIGNING DETAILS
SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2018, 6 – 7PM
Avid Bookshop
493 Prince Avenue
Athens, GA 30601
About the Author:
Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the short story collection Delicate Edible Birds. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, along with five Best American Short Stories anthologies, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. Her next book, a collection of short stories called Florida, will be published in June 2018. Lauren lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.
About the Book:
In her vigorous and moving new book, Lauren Groff brings her electric storytelling and intelligence to a world in which storms, snakes, and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life, but the greater threats and mysteries are of a human, emotional, and psychological nature. Among those navigating it all 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.
Avid’s Rachel Watkins says about Florida: “Lauren Groff’s collection of short stories have an underlying character (the place that is Florida) and a lurking theme: what society says mothers should be. There is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction, danger, and oppressive humidity in these stories, yet they celebrate the strength and resilience of women most often undervalued by our culture. I dare you to read this without underlining brilliant passages.”
