From Lauren Groff, author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling
novel Fates and Furies, comes Delicate Edible Birds, one of the most
striking short fiction debuts in years. Here are nine stories of
astonishing insight and variety, each revealing a resonant drama within
the life of a twentieth-century American woman.
In Sir Fleeting, a Midwestern farm girl on her honeymoon in Argentina
falls into lifelong lust for a French playboy. In Blythe, an attorney
who has become a stay-at-home mother takes a night class in poetry and
meets another full-time mother, one whose charismatic brilliance changes
everything. In The Wife of the Dictator, that eponymous wife (brought
back . . . from [the dictator's] last visit to America) grows more
desperately, menacingly isolated every day. In Delicate Edible Birds, a
group of war correspondents-a lone, high-spirited woman among them-falls
sudden prey to a brutal farmer while fleeing Nazis in the French
countryside. In Lucky Chow Fun, Groff returns us to Templeton, the
setting of her first book, for revelations about the darkness within
even that idyllic small town.
In some of these stories, enormous changes happen in an instant. In
others, transformations occur across a lifetime--or several lifetimes.
Throughout the collection, Groff displays particular and vivid
preoccupations. Crime is a motif--sex crimes, a possible murder, crimes
of the heart. Love troubles recur; they're in every story--love in
alcoholism, in adultery, in a flood, even in the great flu epidemic of
1918. Some of the love has depths, which are understood too late; some
of the love is shallow, and also understood too late. And mastery is a
theme--Groff's women swim and baton twirl, become poets, or try and try
again to achieve the inner strength to exercise personal freedom.
Overall, these stories announce a notable new literary master.
Dazzlingly original and confident, Delicate Edible Birds further
solidifies Groff's reputation as one of the foremost talents of her
generation.
