Lauren Groff follows up The Monsters of Templeton, her joyous first novel, with Delicate Edible Birds, nine stories of astonishing insight and variety, each revealing a resonant drama within the life of a twentieth-century American woman.

In “Sir Fleeting,” a Midwestern farm girl on her honeymoon in Argentina falls into lifelong lust for a French playboy. In “Blythe,” an attorney who has become a stay-at-home mother takes a night class in poetry and meets another full-time mother, one whose charismatic brilliance changes everything. In “The Wife of the Dictator,” that eponymous wife (“brought back… from [the dictator’s] last visit to America”) grows more desperately, menacingly isolated every day. In the title story, “Delicate Edible Birds,” a group of war correspondents — a lone, high-spirited woman among them — falls sudden prey to a brutal farmer while fleeing Nazis in the French countryside.