Published in 2009
306 pages
Lauren Groff was born in Cooperstown, N.Y. and grew up one block from the Baseball Hall of Fame. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Hobart, and Five Points as well as in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 2007, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008. She was awarded the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and has had residencies and fellowships at Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband, Clay, and her dog, Cooper.
What is this book about?
In “Sir Fleeting,” a Midwestern farm girl on her honeymoon in Argentina falls into lifelong lust for a French playboy. In “Blythe,” an attorney who has become a stay-at-home mother takes a night class in poetry and meets another full-time mother, one whose charismatic brilliance changes everything. In “The Wife of the Dictator,” that eponymous wife (“brought back . . . from [the dictator’s] last visit to America”) grows more desperately, menacingly isolated every day. In “Delicate Edible Birds,” a group of war correspondents–a lone, high-spirited woman among them–falls sudden prey to a brutal farmer while fleeing Nazis in the French countryside. In “Lucky Chow Fun,” Groff returns us to Templeton, the setting of her first book, for revelations about the darkness within even that idyllic small town.
In some of these stories, enormous changes happen in an instant. In others, transformations occur across a lifetime–or several lifetimes.
Throughout the collection, Groff displays particular and vivid preoccupations. Crime is a motif–sex crimes, a possible murder, crimes of the heart. Love troubles recur–they’re in every story–love in alcoholism, in adultery, in a flood, even in the great flu epidemic of 1918. Some of the love has depths, which are understood too late; some of the love is shallow, and also understood too late. And mastery is a theme–Groff’s women swim and baton twirl, become poets, or try and try again to achieve the inner strength to exercise personal freedom.
Overall, these stories announce a notable new literary master. Dazzlingly original and confident, Delicate Edible Birds further solidifies Groff’s reputation as one of the foremost talents of her generation.
