Ghosts and Void 009
Round Earth, in its imaginary corner 027
The Dog Who Became a Wolf 061
Midnight Zone 089
iWall 109
For the God of Love, For the Love of God 129
Salvador 165
Flower Hunter 193
211 above and below
Snake Story 251
Ipor 265

Acknowledgments 335
Translator's Note: Eggs and Oranges 337

"My special, dark, and prickly anxiety" that dominates my daily life

The author once said in an interview, “These short stories all arose from the fact that I have contradictory and uneasy feelings about the place called Florida,” and the characters’ feelings about Florida are also ambivalent.
Although he is “dazzled by the dazzling flora and fauna” (“The Flower Hunters”), he does not regret leaving Florida in the summer, where he feels “slowly drowning in hot water” (“Ipor”).
Florida, which evokes such conflicting emotions in them, is a place where storms, snakes, and sinkholes lurk on the edges of everyday life, and so they all share a sense of anxiety and fear.

In "The Flower Hunters," the protagonist, a mother of two, is terrified of a gaping sinkhole around the corner of her house.
As she crouched on the edge of the sinkhole and peered into it while the rain poured down, no raindrops gathered, and she thought, “That’s really bad.”
That means the water is trickling down through a small crack, that there is a passage for the water to drain, that there is a hole there, a huge hole right under her feet.” The protagonist of “Eye Wall” is left home alone to weather the hurricane’s maelstrom.
In the midst of a gust of wind and a storm that twists and shakes the house and slowly tears the roof off, the protagonist is accompanied only by ghosts—her husband who died of a heart attack after leaving her, her college sweetheart who committed suicide with a pistol, her father who died of cancer—and animals.
Two young sisters are left on a remote island without electricity, water, or proper food, struggling to survive in the wild ("The Dog Who Became a Wolf"), and the deaf protagonist is stranded in the middle of a lake inhabited by alligators, vipers, and pygmies, having lost his oar ("In an Imaginary Corner of the Round Earth").

But there are so many things in the world that make them more anxious than their fear of nature.
When Helena, the protagonist of "Salvador," stumbles while trying to make her way through a storm that makes it difficult to take even a single step, the person who saves her is the store owner who had been smiling wickedly at her.
Now she waits anxiously for “the moment when he will make a surprise attack.”
Sometimes I go for walks and jogs to soothe my "special, dark, prickly anxiety" ("Ghosts and Emptiness"), but there's been a recent rape near my house, and I actually find the victim lying on the ground ("Snake Story").

Some short stories feature a mother with two sons who appear to be the same person, and in these cases the fear is heightened by the fact that they are 'mothers'.
She is afraid because “she must stay here as long as she can, since the children have already come into this world, but she cannot outlive them” (“The Flower Hunters”), and she is afraid because she knows that the moment will surely come when her sons will suffer, because “she cannot help thinking that the children who are now being born will be the last generation of mankind” (“Ifor”).
Moreover, since the protagonists of all the works except for two (「In the Round Earth, in its Virtual Corner」 and 「For the God of Love, for the Love of God」) are women, their anxiety is also connected to the experiences of women.
The hardships women face in life today—family discord, career struggles, economic instability, dating violence—threaten their daily lives like a gaping sinkhole near their home or a Florida panther living in a thicket.

Anxiety that eats away at your soul, the loneliness of standing alone in a distant space and time.
Looking at the small and imperfect beings of this universe
The deep and expansive gaze of young master Lauren Groff

We can explain our perspective on the world with terms like human view, world view, and nature view, but for Lauren Groff's work, I wanted to use the word "cosmology," which encompasses all of those and includes something bigger than that.
“It’s a cosmic book.” If anyone asked me, I’d be happy to answer that way.

From the translator's note

In "Florida," Lauren Groff explores the world not just from a human perspective, but from the perspective of all living and non-living things, natural objects like the moon and the ocean.
The story is told from the perspective of a raccoon, an armadillo, an alligator, and a snake, from the perspective of a house weathering a storm, and from the perspective of the moon looking down on humans.
So this collection of short stories pulses with a vibrant life force, and Lauren Groff, with her sharp insights and sharper prose, brings this energy to life with unparalleled vividness.

And in his works, humans are nothing more or less than just another living being among countless other beings.
Because humans do not possess any special qualities that set them apart from other beings, the moon in the sky does not notice us no matter how hard we try, and the sea is indifferent to human desires.
So it is wonderful and admirable, but on the other hand, it makes people feel lonely, as if they are standing alone in a vast space and time.
When you carry around the loneliness of a “living creature” like a shadow, at some point you have to admit that you were alone, are alone, and will always be alone.
And when you acknowledge that fact, you begin to feel the fear and pity for the little creatures that rustle wherever your feet touch.

When endless loneliness threatens our lives and threatens the characters, it is none other than stories that offer comfort.
In "The Dog Who Became a Wolf," the older sister, who is left on a remote island, constantly tells stories to her younger brother, and in "Midnight Zone," the mother, who is left in the forest with her young sons with a head injury, keeps telling stories to her sons and reading Alice in Wonderland to keep herself conscious.
The graduate student in "Up and Down" carries around "Middlemarch" even as he becomes homeless, and the protagonist of "In an Imaginary Corner of the Round Earth" finds solace in the Shakespeare, Neruda, and Rilke his mother used to tell him about when he was a child, and in the books his mother sent him after running away from home with his father.
Likewise, readers of Florida will find solace in Lauren Groff's work, which depicts a life of anxiety and loneliness while also telling a story of vitality and compassion.
As the New York Times put it, the stories in Florida, “even in their most ominous final gestures, lean toward the promise and love of good people,” offer us, lonely and anxious beings, a little solace in these stories.