Lauren Groff

If it’s June, novelist Lauren Groff is probably in a panic, said in Hazlitt .net. With four books behind her—all of them popular and critically acclaimed—the 39-year-old Florida-based writer still can’t help getting anxious about how people will respond to her latest. “I have to run about 10 miles a day just to get to sleep at night,” she says. It can’t help her nerves that the book is Florida, a short-story collection that airs just about everything the Cooperstown, N.Y., native dislikes about her adopted state. “I’m criticizing Florida, but obviously I love it too,” she has said. It also can’t help that though she’s gotten used to seeing lizards and alligators during her 12 years in the Sunshine State, she almost invariably spots a snake during her long runs. “They’re the one thing that [still] sends visceral horror through me,” she says. “A lightning bolt—pretty much daily.”

Groff’s Florida oozes danger, said in NPR.org. “Everything is kind of out to get you,” she says. Sinkholes. Bad men. Huge mosquitoes. “And if it’s not the hurricanes,” she says, “it’s the termites.” Groff also found quaint Cooperstown unsettling— enough so that she made its lake home to a giant amphibious creature in her debut, the Orange Prize finalist The Monsters of Templeton. But Florida teems with far more hazards, and Groff has learned to appreciate that about it, because she prefers being on alert to being complacent. “I’m just fascinated by the place,” she says. “It feels as though there’s this deep dark something happening at the center of the state, and yet we’re just pouring sunshine over it. And that feels very much like a microcosm of America.”