A stunning, fierce collection from a master of the short story and one of the most important writers of our time. "Wallops its reader with ferocious honesty and searing emotional force even as it demonstrates artistic delicacy, intellectual subtlety, and ethical nuance."-- Boston Globe 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. Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and two other story collections, including Florida. Winner of The Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, she has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and her books have been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx.
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