Lauren Groff's strength may be the short story

I wasn't a huge fan of Lauren Groff's novel Fates and Furies but have come to think that her greatest strength is as a writer of short stories. The storynform today is somewhat out of vogue , which is too bad. In the 80s, under the reign of Raymond Carver, writers were turning out story collections - a natural outcome of  the rise of the graduate writing program - and publishers were looking for story collections; there was the strange idea in the air that the attention span of the next century would not encompass longer works and that the story was the way to go. Well that's proven half-true; attention spans are minuscule , but serious readers have not yet given up on the novel.  In fact the novel is still the only way to earn serious chops, even for writers who should stay w their greatest strength, e.g. lahiri, Saunders.  As to Griffin - jury still out, but I'm poking around in her new collection, Florida, and really liked the first entry, Ghosts and Empties, a tour of what must be a Gainesville neighborhood as seen by a young mom who has taken to walking the darkened streets at dusk and later. We see how the neighborhood declined and is now being "discovered," for better or worse, amid many strange scenes beautifully rendered by the paragraph - the gleaming white light of the drugstore, the old convent now housing only four elderly sisters, the homeless population including a couple that seeks shelter by night beneath the narrator's porch, and many moments glimpsed through lighted windows  - including moments of nudity and of an overweight young man on a treadmill. There's no plot here and maybe this could better be described as an essay , but whatever the form Grof does a great job capturing a moment and a mood. I have probably posted on this story before - when it ran in the New Yorker (I wonder if I liked it then), and have also posted on the second story in the collection, at the four corners of the imagined (?) world, which is like a novel in miniature, a portrait of a life. Will read further.