"Finus Bates has loved chatty, elegant Birdie Wells ever since he saw her cartwheel naked through the woods near the backwater town of Mercury, Mississippi, in 1917. Having "caught hold of some loose line in her that would attach itself to stray wildness" and never let go, he's loved her for some eighty years: through their marriages to other people, through the mysterious early death of Birdie's womanizing husband, Earl, and through all the poisonous accusations against Birdie by Earl's no-good relatives.
All during Mercury's evolution from a sleepy backwater to a small city, Finus (reporter, radio host, and obit writer) has aimed to have the last word on its inhabitants, from obsequious undertaker Parnell Grimes to Euple Scarbrough, local encyclopedia of useless knowledge, and Vish, a real oldtime medicine woman. But ever loyal to Birdie, Finus won't rush to unravel the mystery of her husband's untimely passing - not until Birdie herself has entered Mercury's heaven."--BOOK JACKET.
"In a sprawling house on a hill, floating in a sea of green fields, charismatic therapist Anton Furey is dying. The tribe he heads - his five children, his wife's three girls, and their uniting child Alice - has gathered in a vigil at Chardin, the farm where they grew up and Anton played out his visions of communal living. In the 1970s they had been famous for being the new American blended family, their utopian lifestyle chronicled by film crews and reporters.
But as Anton grows weaker, the hurts, allegiances, and betrayals of those years boil to the surface; and the children find themselves forced to confront the knotty intimacies of the past along with the misunderstandings of the present as they struggle to make their peace with Anton - and Anton struggles to make peace with himself."--BOOK JACKET.
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.
Winner of the Story Prize. Finalist for the National Book Award, Kirkus Prize, and Southern Book Prize. Stories from this collection previously appeared in Best American Short Stories 2014, 2016, and 2017, the 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, The New Yorker, Tin House, Subtropics, American Short Fiction, Esquire, and in Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists issue. Named one of the best books of 2018 by over two dozen publications. Published in thirteen foreign markets.
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Contains:
Ghosts and Empties
At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners
Dogs Go Wolf
Midnight Zone
Eyewall
For the God of Love, for the Love of God
Salvador
Flower Hunters
Above and Below
Snake Stories
Yport
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