Last month, NPR’s Morning Edition Book Club announced their third pick, Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (Penguin/Riverhead), helping to propel it on to best seller lists. In two weeks the NPR show will host a conversation with the author.

In a short tee up to the discussion, the hosts of Morning Edition say the novel as a “story of a marriage in two parts” as both the wife and the husband have their due.

Groff quickly pushes back against that summary, saying “It’s not a book about marriage.”

Rather, she explains, marriage is how she talks about larger ideas concerning creativity, sex, time, and rage. She says marriage becomes a vehicle to dig into some of the things she resisted about the institution, and did not know she resisted, until she spent five years working on the novel.

Readers are invited to submit a smartphone voice memo. Groff will answer some of the queries on Morning Edition.

Fates and Furies is on the National Book Awards longst for fiction; the shortlist will be announced tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2015 at 12:42 pm and is filed under 2015 -- Fall, Fiction, Literary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.