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Lauren Groff

Author of Fates and Furies

32+ Works 11,936 Members 696 Reviews 21 Favorited

About the Author

Lauren Groff graduated from Amherst College and received an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her books include The Monsters of Templeton, Delicate Edible Birds, and Fates and Furies. Arcadia won of the Medici Book Club Prize. Her fiction has also won the Paul Bowles Prize show more for Fiction, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Tin House, One Story, McSweeney's, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three editions of the Best American Short Stories. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Lucy Schaeffer

Works by Lauren Groff

Associated Works

The Best American Short Stories 2007 (2007) — Contributor — 825 copies
The Best American Short Stories 2010 (2010) — Contributor — 409 copies
100 Years of the Best American Short Stories (2015) — Contributor — 282 copies
The Best American Short Stories 2014 (2014) — Contributor — 269 copies
The Best American Short Stories 2016 (2016) — Contributor — 258 copies
The Best American Short Stories 2017 (2017) — Contributor — 183 copies
The Monster's Corner (2011) — Contributor — 159 copies
The Best American Short Stories 2022 (2022) — Contributor — 89 copies
Granta 139: Best of Young American Novelists (2017) — Contributor — 70 copies

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Common Knowledge

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Reviews

Spoilers Abound.

I found myself talking back to the book after having read & returned it. I liked the first half. The second half was difficult and I didn't really believe it.
Why was the gallery owner a sadist? Why did he expect her to want to stay with him when he mistreated her? Now as I'm writing I wonder -- did she respond sexually to the mistreatment & so he thought it was OK? But she responded so strongly to her husband in sex, and he wasn't a sadist. I am no expert but it seems inconsistent to me.
Was there a reason why the Uncle cut her off? Why did he adopt her if he didn't want to support her? He was rich and it would have been easy for him to pay for college. Why did the Uncle cave when she blackmailed him? He could have moved the painting and denied it all -- so he wanted to pay. Why then & not for college?
Can you really contact the FBI and tell them you have oodles of absolutely incriminating documents about a financial criminal and then tell them Never Mind? Was the private investigator so good that the FBI couldn't duplicate any of her investigation?

And....
The mother was shown thinking about how much she had done for her son. Was it that she rescued his son? I expected to find that the mother had bankrolled and supported the plays but that wasn't the case.
I don't know what I think of the man. He took his wife as he wanted her to be and never saw beyond that. Same with his friends.

I think the writing is skillful and talented but it left such bad feelings.
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franoscar | 209 other reviews | Mar 12, 2024 |
Such varying views on this one. It's the story of a striving-to-be utopian commune in western NY in the 60s, where our protagonist, Bit, takes us through his childhood to adulthood-- to a futuristic, dystopian pandemic in the city. My first book by Groff, the writing is lush and poetic, sometimes overwhelmingly so. However, that didn't stop me from caring about Bit and his journey towards peace. I'll read Groff again.
 
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crabbyabbe | 118 other reviews | Feb 28, 2024 |
Immensely enjoyed reading this (on recommendation by a friend). Taken as a whole, the prose style for each part of the book was mesmerizing. Where Fates, and following Lotto was embued with a sense of longing and dream-like composition, Furies and Mathilde had a distinctly purposeful cadence. Hers was full of anger, even a kind of defiance not only against her family members but perhaps even against the readers --- as if to prove something to us all.
 
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postsbygina | 209 other reviews | Feb 27, 2024 |
It doesn't take long for the forward motion of this book to make it compelling. Similar in its Elizabethan (word peppered) style, it's girl/woman intimacy, and in its intensity, to Hannah Kent's [b:Burial Rites|17333319|Burial Rites|Hannah Kent|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1384207446l/17333319._SY75_.jpg|21943144].
Then this phantom self blew through her and then frose out of her and dispersed into the mist that swallowed her on the cold ground, and she was left alone on the wobbling earth again. p.62.
I loved the abstracted sense of moving through landscapes almost becoming an end in itself.

Even when she halts, the forward movement continues as if the journey is one of life itself - which it is.

I'll need to spend time digesting the way the end came after an acceleration in pace...

Lauren Groff is a virtuosic talent. I'm looking forward to more. So I've opened up [b:Matrix|57185348|Matrix|Lauren Groff|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617287438l/57185348._SY75_.jpg|87447766]...
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simonpockley | 28 other reviews | Feb 25, 2024 |

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