Short stories of human nature inextricably linked to the swampy, sticky, wild lands of Florida.
Co-presented this month with Orion Magazine Climate Reads returns on May 25! Novelist and essayist Sarah Gerard will moderate this conversation with literary editor John Freeman and Executive Committee Vice Chair of the Suncoast Sierra Club, Erica Hall.
Missed the live event? Watch the video here.
FLORIDA
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 edges 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.
Praise for FLORIDA
Winner of the Story Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award, Kirkus Prize, and Southern Book Prize
Named one of the best books of 2018 by over two dozen publications
“Groff’s gifts as a writer just keep soaring higher and higher.” – NPR’s Fresh Air
Sarah Gerard’s essay collection Sunshine State was a New York Times Editors Choice, a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her novel Binary Star was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was a best-book-of-the-year at NPR, Vanity Fair, and BuzzFeed. Shondaland called her novel True Love “appalling and hilarious… surprisingly poignant. It’s an extremely resonant social satire.” Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, Guernica, The Baffler, The Believer, Vice, Electric Literature, and several anthologies. She’s been supported by scholarships and fellowships from Yaddo, Tin House, PlatteForum, the Whiting Foundation, and Ucross, and was the 2018 – 2019 New College of Florida Writer-in-Residence. She lives with her partner, the writer Patrick Cottrell. Learn more at Sarah-Gerard.com.
John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s and the author and editor of ten books, including Dictionary of the Undoing, The Park, Tales of Two Planets, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside My Love. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Orion, and been translated into over twenty languages. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York City, where he teaches writing at NYU and is executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf.
Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collection Delicate Edible Birds. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, and several Best American Short Stories anthologies. She has won the Paul Bowles Prize for Fiction, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize; and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orange Award for New Writers, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. From penguinrandomhouse.com.
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