A requirement to be well read

If you read Lauren Groff’s recent By the Book column, you might have been struck by something noteworthy.

Her answer to every question in the weekly The New York Times feature cited female authors — not a single male one.

Those responses (and a pointed one at the end about male writers rarely listing female ones) prompted The Guardian’s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett to call Groff’s responses “brilliantly subversive” and assert that one cannot be well read without also reading women’s work.

Groff, who was a finalist for the National Book Award Finalist in 2015 with the novel Fates and Furies, recently released a story collection titled Florida. 

Read Groff’s Q&A here and Cosslett’s essay here.