Lauren Groff on Masters of Short Fiction
Lauren Groff is perhaps most known for her best-selling third novel, “Fates and Furies,” which President Barack Obama named his favorite book of 2015, but she has also developed a devoted audience for her short stories. In those compressed works, she manages to tackle great themes—grief, parenthood, violence toward women and the meaning of safety, how we imagine our lives turning out, and how those imagined futures weave themselves into reality in surprising ways. Groff’s latest collection, “Brawler,” comes out next week. Not long ago, she joined us to discuss some of her favorite writers of short fiction. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.
Complete Stories
by Clarice Lispector
Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920. Her family fled the pogroms when she was a baby, eventually settling in Brazil. As an adult, she moved around a lot because her husband was a diplomat. And I think she’s a genius. There’s just nobody who writes like her. Her writing plays according to very strong internal rules—the aesthetic is really regulated and, in many ways, sui generis. I just love her so much.
Lispector wrote a lot about women. Many of her stories are about the internal space within women’s psyches, and the way that they encounter the world as they go about their lives. She wrote about the world as we know it, but in such a slantwise way that it becomes surreal. They convey her vision of the world, which was extraordinarily strange. I also think that, because of her background, she always felt like a bit of an outsider. You can tell this from her work: even though she’s writing from within the center, in a way, her perspective is a few steps outside of it.
The Diving Pool
by Yoko Ogawa
This book is three novellas—I think that might still fall under the rubric of “short story.” Ogawa is another surrealist, in some ways, and these stories are really disturbing—almost on the brink of horror. They’re really about evil itself. “The Diving Pool,” the one the collection is named after, haunts me. I think about it all the time. Another, “Pregnancy Diary,” actually first appeared in The New Yorker. Ogawa’s writing—at least, as translated by Stephen Snyder—is made up of these relatively simple sentences, but the cumulative effect is hypnotic.
The Visiting Privilege
by Joy Williams
I talk about Williams all the time, because I think she is a great master. Her brain is just so weird and magnificent and wondrous.
These stories span her career, so you see the way her work progresses through time. There are some new stories toward the end.
What I love most about Williams is the way that she will break a sentence to surprise you. Again, like Lispector, she has her own internal logic. She has an internal view of the world that is so clear to her that, when you finish reading her stories, you also start to walk through the world in the way that she does.
Counternarratives
by John Keene
This is a masterpiece—one of the best short-story/novella collections written by an American in the past fifty years, I think. I just love Keene’s voice and how he subverts American history. The book is quite experimental, taking preëxisting structures and transforming them in ways that really speak to the underlying stories that he’s trying to tell. One way the book approaches history is by unfolding across different places and examining the past of each of them. The first story, for example, is called “Mannahatta,” and it’s about the beginning of Manhattan. There’s another story titled “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790-1825; or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows.” I think that kind of detail speaks to the book’s playfulness, singing back to things in the canon, like “Moby-Dick.”
Forty Stories
by Anton Chekhov
He’s the source, right? I try to read him once a year, just to go back to his way of thinking about the world. Chekhov had such profound empathy for every single one of his characters, and when I go back to him I try to glean something from that—the lack of judgment, the clarity of vision.