Lauren Groff is now officially my favorite living American writer, or at least she’s tied for that spot with Joshua Cohen (author of The Netanyahus). Groff's writing is full of deep affection for her characters but she’s also as wise and honest as a steel beartrap: not one of these stories lets a single character off the hook for the decisions they’ve made or the thoughts, motives, and feelings they have. She’s also just an incredible writer of prose. She describes air conditioners springing to life in the Florida spring “like trolls under the windows.” One character, a brilliant mathematician, notes that “unlike other numbers, money was already self-fertilized.” Whenever I started one of the stories in Florida, I was immediately hooked and couldn’t stop reading. “When we are lonely for a long time,” she writes in one story, “we people the void with phantoms.” I don’t know if she’s lonely, but there are clearly a lot of phantoms in Groff’s world, and we’re lucky that she shares them with us.