this collection of short stories was published in 2018 but there were a many instances where I sharply recognized a passage, though not the entire plot of each story. so it was a relief that I saw that 4 of the 11 stories had been previously published, as early as 2011, and all in The New Yorker (so likely on-line), and so very likely that I did read them before and that I'm not suffering a new kind of chronic case of deja-vu. that, and the recurring themes of survival and portent danger lurking made my reading experience one of anxiety. I can see what a gifted writer she is, but she is firmly in the pessimism camp: climate change will wipe us out and doom is our inheritance.
Groff tends to leave her characters unnamed, making their plight both more tangible and immediate to the reader but also, somehow, inconsequential to the larger world. her narrators are deeply recognizable, as least to me, a woman, a grad student, a wife, a mother. not since Alice Monro has an author so finely dissected the minutia of these little lives.