Publisher Comments:
From Lauren Groff, author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling first novel The Monsters of Templeton, comes Delicate Edible Birds, one of the most striking short fiction debuts in recent 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.

Read a Q&A about Delicate Edible Birds.

Stories from this collection have appeared in journals and anthologies including:
Best American Short Stories 2007
Best New American Voices 2008
The Pushcart Prize Anthology: Best of the Small Presses XXXII
The Atlantic Monthly
Ploughshares
Glimmer Train Stories
One Story
The Chattahoochee Review
Five Chapters

"Nine wildly unique, exquisitely symphonic tales, full of beauty, tragedy, and the sudden horror of shocking images....Groff moves among these wholly unrelated worlds with a vision that happily traps the reader. Highly recommended."
"Tales of ordinary transformations and everyday occurrences are made magical in a collection of nine stories by Groff... The 'wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous' nature of the elements may serve to explain the power in these stories, which could have faltered in the hands of a lesser writer."
"Groff follows up The Monsters of Templeton with this innovative and beautifully written collection that covers a wide swath of humanity, from east coast resort towns, to the early 20th century flu epidemic, to WWII Europe... Groff's prose is lovely, and when she nails a story-like the title story about journalists fleeing Nazi-occupied Paris-the results are sublime."

"[R]ichly conceived, finely detailed....Vivid tales from a gifted young writer who continues to surprise."
"Groff's short stories are wholly realized, intricately constructed and compulsively readable. Her odd analogies and images bring new dimension to tales of small-town scandal, love affairs and stunning, incalculable loss."
Available for purchase as of January 27th, 2008 at your local independent bookstore or at these fine retailers: Powell's, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.

Additional Stories:
Small literary journals are the brave and necessary advocates for the art of storytelling at a time when it is increasingly difficult to publish short fiction. Lauren loves and reads these journals, and a number of her stories have appeared in journals including Five Points, Hobart, The Beloit Fiction Journal and Watchword, among others.

Read "Ausbund," a serialized story, at Five Chapters.