An Evening with Lauren Groff in conversation with Patricia Engel

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Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff’s electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region -- from New England to Florida to California -- these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.
“In every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death,“ one character tells us. Among those we see caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling, a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult, a mother blinded by the loss of her family, and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by the double edges of other peoples’ good intentions, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.
Precise, surprising, and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated, sometimes heartbreaking turning points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and what it takes to survive.

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times–bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx.

Patricia Engel is the author of five works of fiction. Her most recent book, a short story collection titled The Faraway World, was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, longlisted for The Story Prize and the Chautauqua Prize, and named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, and a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year. Her novel Infinite Country, a New York Times bestseller, won the New American Voices Award, a Florida Book Award, was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Patricia has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and an O. Henry Award. She is a Professor in the English and Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami.

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