Latest news with #LaurenGroff
New York Times
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In a New Opera, Violence Against Women Is Not Just the Stuff of Fables
A bejeweled doe hides in the forest to protect itself. One day, the doe sees a drowning man who calls out for help. At great risk, the doe saves him. He promises not to reveal the animal's whereabouts but — enticed by a bounty from the king — he betrays the doe, and a brutal fate is suggested. The story of 'The Nine Jewelled Deer,' a new opera that premiered last Sunday at the cultural center Luma Arles, in a co-production with the Aix-en-Provence Festival, is based on an ancient Jataka fable of India, exploring the Buddha's incarnations in both human and animal forms. It has had a decidedly modern rebirth. That tale piqued the interest of half a dozen luminaries in the literary, visual and performing arts, including the author Lauren Groff, the painter Julie Mehretu and the director Peter Sellars, inspiring them to join forces to produce a nonlinear, highly metaphorical adaptation. Their version explores acts of betrayal and exploitation — of the earth, and especially of women. In some cases, its creators said in interviews, it is based on their own experiences and the experiences of women they know. Sellars, known for his avant-garde and socially engaged opera and theater productions, is the sole man among the core creative team. At the heart of the production is Ganavya Doraiswamy, a New York-born musician and performer who blends improvisational jazz with Indian storytelling traditions. Sivan Eldar composed the score and serves as musical director. Groff, the three-time National Book Award finalist and best-selling author, wrote the libretto with Doraiswamy and served as a kind of amanuensis, not just to the writing but to the people involved. Co-starring onstage with Doraiswamy is Aruna Sairam, a renowned ambassador of Indian vocal tradition, particularly South Indian Carnatic music, known for its devotional qualities. Mehretu, who had worked with Sellars on several operas as well — also based on ancient Buddhist stories, she said — contributed her characteristically abstract paintings that form the foundation of the production design. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Elle
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
Exclusive: Lauren Groff Reveals Her Next Book, the Short Story Collection ‘Brawler'
Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. Seven years have passed since the three-time National Book Award-nominated author Lauren Groff last published a short story collection: the beloved, Story Prize-winning Florida. In the near-decade since, she has published two additional novels—Matrix and The Vaster Wilds—and opened The Lynx, a bookstore in Gainesville, Florida. She's served as a chair for the National Book Award for fiction and edited The Best American Short Stories anthology. Last year, she was named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People of the year. A letter from former President Obama hangs in her office. She reads hundreds of books a year and has provided many of her colleagues with glowing blurbs for those books. In other words, Groff is not only one of our 'finest living writers,' as fellow author Hernan Diaz put it to The New York Times; she's also one of our finest and most beloved literary citizens. So it's a relief to know that, in the midst of her ever-growing to-do list, coupled with the shifting gears of modern publishing, Groff has far from abandoned the short-story form. On Feb. 24, 2026, Riverhead Books will publish her next book, a story collection named Brawler. Groff says she's been working on Brawler for a number of years now, having pulled a few of its nine stories from as far back as 2016. Organizing each piece meant considering the collection's connective tissue: Despite its sprawling territory—Brawler jumps from Florida to California to New England and beyond, refusing to stay settled in any one place or time, or with any one cast of characters—the book feels neatly and distinctly of a kind. 'As I'm writing, I don't have much control over which stories come to me with urgency,' Groff says. 'But I do have control over the selection of the stories and the way that they speak to one another. The first story offers questions that are then modified as the stories go on—they're shifted, they're moved, they're seen in a different light. And then the last story has possibly the hardest job, which is to take all the questions that have been asked throughout the story collection, and fragment them, right? I fragment them outward, and create a sense of backwards cohesion.' Brawler's assembled stories follow a mother and her children attempting to flee an abusive husband; a young woman newly responsible for her disabled sibling; a talented but angry swimmer awash in her parent's pain; a group of old classmates gathered to say goodbye to their dying friend; a stunted business scion yearning to make the woman he's fallen for 'presentable' to his family; and more. Each piece brushes up against, as Groff puts it, 'the violence that lurks within familial spaces,' which echo within the 'larger moments of cultural violence that I think we've been in for a very long time.' She continues, 'I was thinking about a lot of the hidden loves and the hidden costs of family—a lot of the secrets that we keep from one another.' The cover features the titular 'brawler' from Groff's story of the same name, first published in The New Yorker in 2019. 'Brawler' became the title of the collection after Groff's literary agent, Bill Clegg, suggested it. 'He was like, 'Of course you're going to call it Brawler,'' Groff says, laughing. 'And I don't know about you, 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.' Brawler's official artwork—designed by Jaya Miceli and featuring the swimmer in black-and-white, her reflection mirrored in an inky blue pool—was immediately Groff's favorite of the options Riverhead sent her. 'It was the one that I gasped when I saw it,' Groff says. 'I was a swimmer, and I have so much love for this girl. I love the way that her swim cap fades into the water, and the way that, if you turn the image upside down, it's a completely different book. It kind of takes your breath away.' As a writer, a bookseller, and the aforementioned literary citizen, Groff insists that the breathtaking nature of such art is, in fact, an issue she considers 'morally urgent.' That's what keeps her returning not only to her novels, but to the creation and curation of her short stories. 'There are times,' she says, 'that I feel unequal to the task of writing in this world because, with the gravity of everything that's going on, you can trick yourself into believing that it's not important, right? Or that it's not important enough to meet with your full soul, because there are people suffering.' To that idea, she responds with a quote from the William Carlos Williams poem 'Asphodel, That Greeny Flower': 'It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.' Groff continues, 'I do feel very deeply that loving attention to the soul—which is what art is—is just as important, if not more so, than constant attention to the news or to Bluesky or to Instagram. I'm not saying that an individual soul can heal the world,' she concludes. 'But I am saying that, if we collectively paid more attention to our own particular souls, possibly the world would be better than it is now.'Brawler is out from Riverhead Books on Feb. 24, 2026.
Yahoo
28-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Authors call on publishers to limit their use of AI
An open letter from authors including Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, R.F. Kuang, Dennis Lehane, and Geoffrey Maguire calls on book publishers to pledge to limit their use of AI tools, for example by committing to only hire human audiobook narrators. The letter argues that authors' work has been 'stolen' by AI companies: 'Rather than paying writers a small percentage of the money our work makes for them, someone else will be paid for a technology built on our unpaid labor.' Among other commitments, the authors call for publishers to 'make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machine' and 'not replace their human staff with AI tools or degrade their positions into AI monitors.' While the initial letter was signed by an already impressive list of writers, NPR reports that another 1,100 signatures were added in the 24 hours after it was initially published. Authors are also suing tech companies over using their books to train AI models, but federal judges dealt significant blows to those lawsuits earlier this week.
TechCrunch
28-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Authors call on publishers to limit their use of AI
In Brief An open letter from authors including Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, R.F. Kuang, Dennis Lehane, and Geoffrey Maguire calls on book publishers to pledge to limit their use of AI tools, for example by committing to only hire human audiobook narrators. The letter argues that authors' work has been 'stolen' by AI companies: 'Rather than paying writers a small percentage of the money our work makes for them, someone else will be paid for a technology built on our unpaid labor.' Among other commitments, the authors call for publishers to 'make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machine' and 'not replace their human staff with AI tools or degrade their positions into AI monitors.' While the initial letter was signed by an already impressive list of writers, NPR reports that another 1,100 signatures were added in the 24 hours after it was initially published. Authors are also suing tech companies over using their books to train AI models, but federal judges dealt significant blows to those lawsuits earlier this week.
CNN
07-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- CNN
Want your kid to be ultra successful? Don't do this
EDITOR'S NOTE: Kara Alaimo is an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her book 'Over the Influence: Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Take It Back' was published in 2024 by Alcove Press. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky. When Jerry Groff's 14-year-old daughter Sarah told him she wanted to swim across a 9-mile lake one Sunday morning, he could have responded in several ways: This idea is crazy — and even dangerous. You should practice swimming more first. We already have other plans. Instead, Jerry and his son boated next to Sarah as she swam. And Jerry's wife, brother and sister-in-law drove along the lake in case Sarah needed a ride home, Susan Dominus wrote in her just-released book, ' The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success.' Sarah ended up swimming the whole lake and setting a town record that day. Today, Sarah True is a two-time Olympian and professional athlete. Her brother, Adam Groff, is a successful entrepreneur. And her sister, Lauren Groff, is an acclaimed novelist. Having parents who fostered their independence was a common theme among people who have grown up to make outsize achievements, according to Dominus, a New York Times Magazine staff writer who interviewed six families for the book. Ultra-successful kids tend to have parents who support rather than micromanage, according to Susan Dominus' "The Family Dynamic." These parents 'were not afraid to let their kids fail at something that seemed really hard,' she said. 'They let their kids make their choices, even if they knew those choices would be difficult.' It's just one of the lessons parents and guardians can take from her research into raising successful kids. Don't coach the coach — or even your kids While the parents Dominus profiled generally supported their kids' dreams, they didn't micromanage their children's progress. 'In not one of these families were the parents overly involved in their kids' educational lives,' she said. 'They were paying attention, they were supportive, they were there.' But when they showed up for their kids' games, they didn't try to tell the coaches how to do their jobs. Author Susan Dominus interviewed six families with high-achieving siblings for her latest book on raising successful children. Instead, Dominus said, parents focused largely on providing warm, supportive homes and let people like teachers, coaches and other mentors handle the instruction and discipline of their children. Lead by example In part, adults didn't 'overparent' because they themselves were busy serving as powerful examples, working hard and contributing to their communities. Generally, whether they worked outside or inside the home, they 'were in roles that they felt were meaningful,' Dominus said. While she was raising her children in Florida in the 1950s, another parent, Millicent Holifield, persuaded the state to create a nursing school for Black women. One of her children, Marilyn Holifield, chose to be one of the first students to desegregate her high school in the early '60s and went on to become a local civic leader and the first Black woman partner at a major law firm in Florida. As a Harvard Law School student, Millicent's son Bishop fought for changes to promote racial equity at the school and later convinced the state of Florida to reopen the Florida A&M University law school so more Black lawyers could be trained. Another son, Ed, became a cardiologist and public health advocate. These driven parents imparted the belief that their kids could conquer the world, too. 'There was a tremendous optimism among so many of these families,' Dominus said. 'It's one thing just to say that. But your kids know if you feel it or if you don't, and their own lives had given them reason for optimism.' That's because many of those parents had overcome difficult things 'or surprised themselves or surprised even societal expectations.' Another common theme was valuing education and being curious and open to new experiences, like travel, art and music. Find the right villages To have those experiences, the parents of ultra-successful siblings needed to find the right places and people. They tended to have supportive villages — literally and figuratively. 'They didn't just live in neighborhoods that offered a lot of enrichment,' Dominus said. 'They took great advantage of it.' The Holifields lived near a university in Tallahassee and made the most of it by taking their kids to local cultural events and enrolling them in art lessons, a children's theater and a journalism workshop. Other parents worked to connect their kids to successful people who could teach them skills. Ying Chen immigrated to the United States from China, worked seven days a week in her family's restaurant and wasn't fluent in English, but she cultivated relationships with accomplished local musicians she met so her children could learn to play instruments. Her son Yi became the fifth employee at Toast, a restaurant management business that went public with the biggest IPO in Boston's history. Chen's son Gang joined another notable startup, Speak, which uses AI to help people learn languages. Her daughter, Elizabeth, became a physician. And her son Devon went on to work for Amazon. Talk about the downsides of success Of course, we don't all need to raise CEOs or Olympic athletes. People who pour so much energy into one pursuit often have less time to invest in other aspects of their lives, Dominus found in her research for the book. 'To achieve really great things requires sacrifice — and that can be in love. It can be in quality of relationships. It can be in peace of mind, it can be in downtime, it can be in reflection,' she said. If kids set hugely ambitious goals for themselves, it's a good idea to 'remind them that there are costs associated with it.' Don't sweat the smaller stuff Parents or guardians often worry about whether they're making the right decisions about things like whether to co-sleep or punish kids, but Dominus said 'these variations, it turns out, have less effect on things like personality and other kinds of outcomes than we really imagined that they do.' Instead, focus on having strong relationships with your children and, most important, Dominus said, 'don't demotivate your kid by being overly involved.' The parents Dominus profiled were the kind who didn't tell their kids they had to swim a lake but let them give it a shot when they wanted to — and were there to love and support them regardless of whether they failed or set a record.
