In At The Round Earth's Imagined Corners, a solitary deaf man rows a boat into the alligator and mosquito infested swamp near his home. The stories are deeply unsettling with a horror that builds quietly and persistently.

The collection is tied together by a persistent sense of unease a feeling of dread, of teetering on the precipice. The shift in Groff's attitude is reflected by the fact that she fought to call the collection Florida, a title her publishers feared would see her book rendered unfindable on internet search engines.įlorida – the climate, history, flora, fauna and politics – is a shifting presence, sometimes occupying front and centre and other times lurking in the shadows of Groff's stories. I actually don't understand it as much as when I first got here because I had just made assumptions.' 'It is this incredible, strange, weird, delicious, bizarre place that I have come to less of an understanding of after 12 years then I thought I would. Lauren Groff's dazzling new collection of 11 short stories. A love for the state's natural features such as the flowing streams she can float down for miles, the perennially sunny weather and flowers that bloom all year round yet despair at the segregation of residents, and the politics that feel as though they belong to another century. If Groff initially felt 'pure hatred' towards Florida and was embarrassed to live there (her home state is New York and her other novels are set there), her feelings have become more complex over time and are now characterised by a deep ambivalence that spans both disgust and appreciation. A few years turned into a family, and they have since raised two boys, now nine and seven, and a dog, in the state. Her husband, Clay Kallman, is from Florida and they moved to swampy, subtropical Gainesville so he could take over the family real estate business. Groff, who in 2017 was named by Granta Magazine as one of the best young American novelists, was only meant to be a temporary resident of Florida. You have to have something to fight against and I fought against this state very hard and I'm still fighting on a daily basis.'

But it became almost my opponent in a way and in order to write fiction you have to be oppositional. 'I wanted to write about serious things and Florida was not serious. 'At first I was really mad at myself for writing about Florida,' Groff says over Skype, where she sits in front of a crammed bookshelf (she is known to read some 300 books a year and is currently embarking on a project to reread all of the works of the Bronte sisters). A sense of dread pervades many of the stories in Groff's new collection Florida.

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