Ask a Bookseller: ‘Brawler’ by Lauren Groff

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Lauren Groff’s novels and short stories have been finalists three times for the National Book Award, and now she’s out with a new collection of short stories entitled “Brawler.” Maire Wilson of Huxley & Hiro Booksellers in Wilmington, Del., says this work is just as strong as her others. Unlike Groff's earlier short story collection, “Florida,” the nine stories in “Brawler” vary their locations as well as time periods and life circumstances. In “What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?,” the longest piece in the book, a young man struggling with alcoholism retreats to his family’s estate to grapple with the ways his life has fallen short of his expectations. “The Wind” is the story of fleeing domestic abuse, passed from mother to daughter. In each story, Wilson says, “everything is so elegantly simple that it's almost like maintaining a conversation with the person across from you, or just kind of listening into this life story. I feel like I'm in the room.” Wilson loves Groff’s “attention to the liveliness of the surroundings” in each story, adding that she comes out of Groff’s novels and short stories "just kind of feeling full” and satisfied.