Brawler: Stories by Lauren Groff

One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with a fierce new story collection, her first since the award-winning and bestselling Florida.

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. It is a timeless, stunning achievement from one of the very best short story writers working today.

REVIEWS

“Groff is one of this country’s most successful and versatile literary figures... [These stories] seem like a homecoming, and honestly, something of a relief. If they have a shared theme, it is how the bedrock of family crumbles, and its members are forced to shift into new formations, occasionally tectonic.”—New York Times

“Few collections have an opener as powerful and instantly classic as Brawler’s...Brawler captures a towering talent and follows protagonists caught in the undertow of their messiest emotions...instead of easy epiphanies, [Groff] offers glimpses of acute clarity, meaning or happiness. They will not repeat; but they are enough to carry you through a life.” —Financial Times

“Lauren Groff is one of our most acclaimed writers of fiction and one of our most dedicated and generous literary citizens...[Brawler] wallops its reader with ferocious honesty and searing emotional force even as it demonstrates artistic delicacy, intellectual subtlety, and ethical nuance.” —The Boston Globe

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN: 978-059341842
Pages: 288