The latest short story collection from the bestselling author of Matrix and Fates and Furies
"Groff reminds us of the myriad human galaxies around us, spinning off brightly into the dark." MELISSA HARRISON, author of All Among the Barley
One of our best writers, Lauren Groff returns with a fierce new story collection, her first since the award-winning and bestselling Florida.
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 single shared theme: the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us.
Among those 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 human fallibility, 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 fracture points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and survival. It is a timeless, stunning achievement from one of the very best short story writers working today.
Praise for Lauren Groff
"Her writing has a timeless quality" The Times on The Vaster Wilds
"Groff's writing is muscular and precise, her themes wildly resonant" Sunday Times on Matrix
"An audacious piece of storytelling, full of passion, wisdom and magic" Sarah Waters on Matrix
"It's as brightly lit as an illuminated manuscript\" Naomi Alderman on Matrix
"One of its stories is a bracing read; together they form a masterpiece" Stylist on Florida
"She's a writer whose turn of phrase can stop you in your tracks" Financial Times on Florida
"Easily the year's best story collection" Vogue on Florida
About the Author
Lauren Groff is the author of three New York Times bestselling novels – Fates and Furies (named by Barack Obama as his favourite book of 2015), The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia – as well as the story collection Delicate Edible Birds. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Groff’s fiction has won the Pushcart Prize and the PEN/O.
Henry Award, among others, and has been shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2017, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her stories have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, the Atlantic, One Story and Ploughshares, and in several of the annual The Best New American Stories anthologies. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and two sons.
Industry Reviews
These are stories of fracture and survival, of the fulcrums on which lives tilt. On finishing Brawler, the world felt more densely peopled, richer with stories. Groff reminds us of the myriad human galaxies all around us, spinning off brightly into the dark.
Melissa Harrison
Groff's first short-story collection since 2018's Florida features nine tales in which characters grapple with their better and worse instincts.
Financial Times Weekend
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)
