And we read in a New Yorker review:
'The follow-up to her blockbuster novel “Fates and Furies,” Lauren Groff’s short-story collection “Florida” is a psychogeography that collapses the real and the imagined."
This is in an article titled 'Lauren Groff’s Stunning New Collection, “Florida,” Unfolds “in an Eden of Dangerous Things”.' And
'“Florida,” Groff’s new collection of short stories, is headquartered in a “dense, damp tangle” of a state, “an Eden of dangerous things.” ..... “The Midnight Zone” opens with a panther sighting, a glimpse of muscle sliding through the trees around the cabin. (That same apparition graces the book’s cover.) The cat portends “something terrible,” “the darkest thing”—the fact of the mother’s mortality, hastened by cancer. Cognitive linguists speak of the unidirectionality of metaphor: we process the abstract in terms of the concrete. The fear of death is like a panther. But as the wounded woman seems to drift out of her body and into the animal’s, the terms of the analogy likewise float free from their domains. When the character’s husband returns to find her hurt, she looks into his face and sees “fear, and it was vast, it was elemental, like the wind itself, like the cold sun I would soon feel on the silk of my pelt.” The living cat has sublimed, becoming hypothetical, symbolic, with a fantastical, icy sun shining on its coat. Our lives are similarly delicate, Groff seems to argue. The worst can swiftly become tangible, just as we, in a matter of moments, can evaporate to spirit.'
We appreciate this summary by Katy Waldman, a staff writer at The New Yorker
'“Florida,” Groff’s new collection of short stories, is headquartered in a “dense, damp tangle” of a state, “an Eden of dangerous things.” ..... “The Midnight Zone” opens with a panther sighting, a glimpse of muscle sliding through the trees around the cabin. (That same apparition graces the book’s cover.) The cat portends “something terrible,” “the darkest thing”—the fact of the mother’s mortality, hastened by cancer. Cognitive linguists speak of the unidirectionality of metaphor: we process the abstract in terms of the concrete. The fear of death is like a panther. But as the wounded woman seems to drift out of her body and into the animal’s, the terms of the analogy likewise float free from their domains. When the character’s husband returns to find her hurt, she looks into his face and sees “fear, and it was vast, it was elemental, like the wind itself, like the cold sun I would soon feel on the silk of my pelt.” The living cat has sublimed, becoming hypothetical, symbolic, with a fantastical, icy sun shining on its coat. Our lives are similarly delicate, Groff seems to argue. The worst can swiftly become tangible, just as we, in a matter of moments, can evaporate to spirit.'
We appreciate this summary by Katy Waldman, a staff writer at The New Yorker
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