Brawler
By Lauren Groff
Riverhead, February 24, 2026
A stunning, fierce collection from a master of the short story and one of the most important writers of our time.
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.
Selected Praise
“As fine and beautifully crafted as any fiction she has written… [Groff] is one of the best writers in the United States, and her prize-winning stories reverberate long after they are read.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books, on Florida
“Easily the year’s best story collection… These indelibly vivid tales read like inoculations against cynicism.” —Vogue, on Florida
“Something untameable lurks restlessly beneath the surface of [Florida]. Groff’s incomparable prose pulsates with peril; its beauty lies in a certain wild lushness.” —Financial Times
“Groff creates luminous, sparely rendered images... I know of few other writers whose sentences are so beautiful and so propulsive.”
—The New York Times Book Review, on The Vaster Wilds
“In resonant imagery and majestic cadences, Groff has written a new gospel.”
—The Atlantic, on The Vaster Wilds
“A page-turner with a built-in engine… Once you slip into its rich rhythms, it’s an engrossing and rewarding journey.” —Vogue, on The Vaster Wilds
“A haunting and holy experience to read and behold.” —Esquire, on The Vaster Wilds
“Flowing prose holds tension and sows mystery on every page.”
—Vulture (New York Magazine), on The Vaster Wilds
“An engrossing historical novel [of] faith, nature, what it means to be a woman in the world—and the ingenuity it takes to survive there.” —San Francisco Chronicle, on The Vaster Wilds
About the Author
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 and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2024 she was named one of the “Time 100 most influential people.” Groff ’s 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 run an independent bookstore, The Lynx.
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