February 24th, 2026 — Happy Pub Day to Lauren Groff‘s (CRF 2021) brand new book of short stories, Brawler (Riverhead Books)! The three-time National Book Award-nominated author says she’s been working on Brawler for a number of years and included work that originated as far back as 2016.
In an exclusive in Elle, Lauren explains how her literary agent, Bill Clegg, suggested the title, the “brawler” coming from Groff’s story of the same name, first published in The New Yorker in 2019. “And I don’t know about you,” she says, “but right now I feel like we need to fight. There’s a lot of laser-like rage happening now, and so, of course, it would make sense to have a book called Brawler out.”
About the Book
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.
“Wallops its reader with ferocious honesty and searing emotional force even as it demonstrates artistic delicacy, intellectual subtlety, and ethical nuance.”—Boston Globe