Lauren Groff was born in 1978 in Cooperstown, N.Y., and grew up one block from the Baseball Hall of Fame. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Hobart, and Five Points, as well as in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 2007, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008. She was awarded the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and has had residencies and fellowships at Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025) Kiran Desai "Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that's also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to live in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world. It has so many urgent things to say-about the costs and consolations of art, about power and class and race and freedom-that reading the book feels like a long conversation at night with your most interesting and ardent friend."
Pan (2025) Michael Clune "Brilliant . . . A mind-bending, psychologically bending, really thrilling, interesting book."
The Director (2025) Daniel Kehlmann "Daniel Kehlmann is shockingly brilliant, a writer of extraordinary range and grace. At times absurdist, at times horrifyingly realist, The Director asks where the moral duty of the artist resides, and how the narcissism of the artistic project can bleed into complicity."
Audition (2025) Katie Kitamura "Katie Kitamura is one of our most brilliant writers, saying far more in her silences, blank spaces, and disruptions than most novelists can say in a hundred thousand words. Auditionis eerie, a book so cold it feels hot. It hooked into my mind like a burr."
The Antidote (2025) Karen Russell "The Antidote is an achingly gorgeous book about dust, memory, basketball, murder, yearning, photography, and the way the land holds both the memory of what went before and the dreams of what may come. Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange."
Ghostroots (2024) 'Pemi Aguda "In Ghostroots, the delightful speculative conceits of the stories are elegantly, even architecturally, balanced with the gorgeous fullness of human emotion, all the hunger and longing and fear and delight of being a human being in the world. A wonderful collection from a truly gifted writer."
The Divorcees (2024) Rowan Beaird "The Divorcees is gorgeously crafted, perfectly balanced, and full of complex, moving and vividly wrought characters. The sunshot pool at the Golden Yarrow, the searing desert heat, the dark glamour of the casinos will stay with me for a long time. Rowan Beaird writes with such ease and confidence that it's hard to believe this novel is her first. An excellent, deeply compelling read."
The Road from Belhaven (2024) Margot Livesey "Margot Livesey is an incandescent writer, generous and graceful, always imbuing her characters with astonishing humanity and grace. I love all Livesey's books, but The Road From Belhaven has become my new favorite; I felt so deeply for Lizzie that I worried about her fate with the same love and indignation and hope I would have for a flesh-and-blood friend of my youth. This book is a cold, clear, perfect lake."
Martyr! (2024) Kaveh Akbar "Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful. MARTYR! is the best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness for people longed for but forever unknown, the way art as eruption of life gazes back into death, and the ecstasy that sometimes arrives - like grace - when we find ourselves teetering on the knife-edge of despair."
This is Salvaged (2023) Vauhini Vara "It takes tremendous courage and wit to look with wonder at the darkest, most shameful places in the human heart and make them hilarious, tender and deeply moving; Vauhini Vara, with her grand-scale compassion and moral complexity in This is Salvaged, can do this magic with astonishing ease."
Emergency (2023) Kathleen Alcott "I've long loved Kathleen Alcott's novels for her whip-smart voice and her taut prose. I was delighted to discover that her collection of short stories, Emergency, is also wonderful, spiny and wry and thrumming with subversive power."
Loot (2023) Tania James "I read Loot in a single sitting; it is a wild, dazzling eighteenth-century romp across continents with profound things to say about invention and self-reinvention, class and fate, and the deeply human hunger to create family as both bulwark against loneliness and constant source of light and warmth."
New Selected Stories (2023) Thomas Mann "I have long loved Thomas Mann's subtlety, erudition, and elegant mind, but it wasn't until reading these newly translated stories that I picked up the range of the author's irony and humor. The art of translation seems to me the most delicate and precise of literary arts, and Damion Searls stands at the very apex of translators into English."
All This Could Be Different (2022) Sarah Thankam Mathews "All This Could Be Different is an extraordinary novel, spiny and delicate, scathingly funny and wildly moving. Sarah Thankam Mathews is a brilliant writer, one whose every ringing sentence holds both bite and heart."
Trust (2022) Hernán Diaz "Hernan Diaz is a narrative genius whose work easily encompasses both a grand scope and the crisp and whiplike line. Trust builds its world and characters with subtle aplomb. What a radiant, profound and moving novel."
A Tiny Upward Shove (2022) Melissa Chadburn "A Tiny Upward Shove is gloriously voiced, the kind of addictive and headlong novel that makes reading into a wild bronco ride. Melissa Chadburn has it, the spark; her first novel is strange and tender and not to be missed."
Heartbroke (2022) Chelsea Bieker "Heartbroke made me feel as though I were watching a great dancer who has gone really deep into the music, all vitality and grace and a sense of dazzling risk. Chelsea Bieker is an absolutely crackling talent."
Very Cold People (2022) Sarah Manguso "Very Cold People knocked me to my knees. So precise, so austere, so elegant, this story is devastatingly familiar to those of us who know the loneliness of growing up in a place of extreme emotional restraint. Manguso is one of my favorite writers, and this book is a revelation."
Strangers I Know (2022) Claudia Durastanti "Playful, looping, atmospheric and funny, Strangers I Know is a singular achievement, one of those rare books that expanded my understanding of what a novel can do. Claudia Durastanti is an absolutely thrilling writer."
Mouth to Mouth (2022) Antoine Wilson "Antoine Wilson's Mouth to Mouth is sleek, swift, and graceful, an agile novel of ideas with unexpectedly sharp teeth."
White on White (2021) Ayşegül Savaş "Marvelous, as elegant as an opaque sheet of ice that belies the swift and turbulent waters beneath."
How to Wrestle a Girl (2021) Venita Blackburn "This collection of extremely short stories builds its power as it goes along . . . I love how Blackburn lets the rawness into her voice in a number of the stories, many of which push against gender norms and expectations of sexual desire."
Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket (2021) Hilma Wolitzer "Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket is electric: with wit, with rage, with grief, with the kind of prose that makes you both laugh and thrill to the darker, spikier emotions just barely visible under the bright surface. What a wonderful collection of stories."
All's Well (2021) Mona Awad "Wild and exhilarating and so fresh it takes your breath away, All's Well is an utterly delicious novel of pain and vitality, Shakespeare and the uncanny, and our own subtle moral failures when we brush up against the pain of others. Mona Awad's talent is so vital that it absolutely roars out of her."
Embassy Wife (2021) Katie Crouch "Embassy Wife is such a swift and delicious novel that a reader can be forgiven for looking up halfway through the book with the slow-dawning realization that all along, underneath this mordant farce, Katie Crouch had some sharp, urgent and intricate things to say about colonization and race, privilege and power, and the often explosive intersection of all of these things in today's Namibia. It is a fascinating novel, and beautifully told."
Unsettled Ground (2021) Claire Fuller "So sharply, so utterly brilliant that I found myself holding my breath while reading it, dazzled by Fuller's mastery and precision. Not since Flaubert's A Simple Heart have I encountered a narrative that shows, with such clear and patient fury, how breathtaking vulnerability can come from poverty, pride, and helpless family love."
Infinite Country (2021) Patricia Engel "Patricia Engel is a wonder; her novels are marvels of exquisite control and profound and delicately evoked feeling. Infinite Country knocked me out with its elegant and lucid deconstruction of yearning, family, belonging, and sacrifice. This is a book that speaks into the present moment with an oracle's devastating coolness and clarity."
Milk Blood Heat (2021) Dantiel W Moniz "Dantiel W. Moniz sings of Florida, girlhood, family, loss, and the glorious, ecstatic, devastating human body. A gorgeous debut from a wickedly talented new writer."
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2021) Mariana Enríquez "After you’ve lived in Mariana Enriquez’s marvelous brain for the time it takes to read The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, the known world feels ratcheted a few degrees off-center. Enriquez’s stories are smoky, carnal, and dazzling."
Parakeet (2020) Marie-Helene Bertino "Marie-Helene Bertino's fiction is miraculous: spry and mordant, with sentences that lull you with their rhythms, then twist suddenly and sting. Parakeet is a strange book in the greatest sense: it sunders reality in sudden transformations and slippages, in the depth of its aches, in the beauty it insists upon in the face of violence, and in the powerful joy that Bertino dowses deep under the surface of even the bleakest moments of her characters' lives."
Sea Wife (2020) Amity Gaige "Sea Wife brilliantly breathes life not only into the perils of living at sea, but also into the fraught and hidden dangers of domesticity, motherhood, and marriage. What a smart, swift, and thrilling novel."
How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020) C Pam Zhang "C Pam Zhang's debut is ferocious, dark and gleaming, a book erupting out of the interstices between myth and dream, between longing and belonging. How Much of These Hills Is Gold tells us that stories--like people, like the rough and stunning landscape of California itself--are constantly in the process of being made, broken, and finally remade into something tender and new."
Hex (2020) Rebecca Dinerstein Knight "In her brilliant second novel, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight cannily explores both the poisons and the antidotes of love, ambition, mentorship, and yearning, and she does it all in prose so lively that I often found myself laughing with pleasure. Hex is some dark and joyous witchery."
The Limits of the World (2019) Jennifer Acker "Such a smart, compassionate and elegant novel, so deeply invested in morality and the subtleties of families, cultures, and continents."
Leading Men (2019) Christopher Castellani "I read Christopher Castellani's Leading Men in one quiet, sunny, rapt afternoon, and spent hours afterwards just stunned from having been immersed in such a tender, psychologically devastating, and gorgeously precise novel. An extraordinary book."
Sugar Run (2019) Mesha Maren "A heady admixture of explosive plot and taut, burnished prose . . . Mesha Maren writes like a force of nature."
Women Talking (2018) Miriam Toews "Women Talking is an astonishment, a volcano of a novel with slowly and furiously mounting pressures of anguish and love and rage. No other book I've read in the past year has spoken so lucidly about our current moment, and yet none has felt as timeless; the always-wondrous Miriam Toews has written a book as close to a Greek tragedy as a contemporary Western novelist can come."
The Third Hotel (2018) Laura van den Berg "I love Laura van den Berg for her eeriness and her elegance, the way the fabric of her stories is woven on a slightly warped loom so that you read her work always a bit perturbed. The Third Hotel is artfully fractured, slim and singular; it's a book that sings, but always with a strange pressure more felt than heard beneath the song."
Heart-Breaker (2018) Claudia Dey "A dark star of a book, glittering with mordant humor and astonishing, seductive strangeness and grace. I am a giant fan of Claudia Dey’s wild brain."
Goodbye, Vitamin (2017) Rachel Khong "Khong is a magician, and we are lucky to fall under her spell at the very beginning of her brilliant writing life."
The Answers (2017) Catherine Lacey "Catherine Lacey is one of the most intelligent and brittle and funny writers of her generation. In The Answers she builds -- out of the raw stuff of bewilderment and absence -- a soaring, heartbreaking work that's just on the right side of being nearly too beautiful to bear."
(b.1978)
