Florida isn’t just the title of Lauren Groff’s new story collection, published in June by Riverhead books; It’s also a bad joke, a good home, a source of inspiration, a set of contradictions, and, perhaps, ultimately a state of mind.
![Severe Weather In The Sunshine State](https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/1252/282972/5b4ecea658def/Severe-Weather-In-The-Sunshine-State.jpg)
LAUREN Groff never wanted to live in Florida. “I mean, Florida is the biggest joke of all the states,” she says. “It is the punch line to every other state’s joke.” Nevertheless here she is: the acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and twelve-year resident of Gainesville whose husband works in his family’s construction and real estate business and whose two sons have only ever called the Sunshine State home.
“It’s a struggle every day,” Groff says, biting into toast with preserves at Oxford Exchange in Tampa, where we’re having breakfast on the third morning of the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference. “We moved here because, well, family businesses—they’re impossible to get out of. We’re never leaving.” She smiles ruefully as she chews. “I haven’t come to terms with being a Floridian yet. This is not my vision of myself. I feel if I were given my druthers, I would live in Paris full time, but that’s not where life brought me.”
It is in Florida, however, where Groff has honed her writing voice— all of her books have been published in the years she has lived here—and it is in Florida, perhaps, where she has discovered her most powerful subject matter. Groff’s new story collection, appropriately titled Florida, published in June by Riverhead Books, is ambitious, personal, and dangerous. Made up of eleven stories, it begins and ends with narratives told from the perspective of a character at odds with her circumstances. “Ghosts and Empties” follows a woman, a mother, as she runs in the predawn darkness trying to both escape from and return to her spouse and children. The final story, “Yport,” shows the same mother on vacation in France with her sons and, in the last scene, crouching in fierce maternal protection over one of them.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July - August 2018 من Poets & Writers Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July - August 2018 من Poets & Writers Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
![Literary MagNet](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/1252/1324475/JHGBhnCxQ1686717526002/LITERARY-MAGNET.jpg)
Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
![THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/1252/1324475/Fha0qwEiI1685098998945/THE-MEUSEUM-OF-HUMAN-HISTORY.jpg)
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
![The Sea Elephants](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/1252/1324475/xItY-WFZV1685098668740/THE-SEA-ELEPHANTS.jpg)
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
![The History of a Difficult Child](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/1252/1324475/afVUaSbIo1685098134483/THE-HISTORY-OF-A-DIFFICULT-CHILD.jpg)
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
![The Sorrows of Others](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/1252/1324475/zDrZSD7Pg1685097575889/THE-SORROWS-OF-OTHERS.jpg)
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
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We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
![RADICAL ATTENTION](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/1252/1324475/pUEExHk0j1685087300498/RADICAL-ATTENTION.jpg)
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
![The Fine Print](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/1252/1261885/VWt-39Nru1680009691089/THE-FINE-PRINT.jpg)
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
![First](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/1252/1261885/UrpCrshYT1680009391811/FIRST.jpg)
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
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Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.