I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
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ONE OF TIME'S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2020. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Tor.com
"As enchanting as fairy tales, as mysterious as dreams, these exquisitely composed fictions are as urgent and original as any being written today." —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction
An urgent and unsettling collection of women on the verge from Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg's first story collection since her prizewinning book The Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and the mind. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg's trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. Moving from the peculiarities of Florida to liminal spaces of travel in Mexico City, Sicily, and Iceland, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the fears we reveal to no one but ourselves.
In "Lizards," a man mutes his wife's anxieties by giving her a LaCroix-like seltzer laced with sedatives. In the title story, a woman poses as her more successful sister during a botched Italian holiday, a choice that brings about strange and destructive consequences, while in "Karolina," a woman discovers her prickly ex-sister-in-law in the aftermath of an earthquake and is forced to face the truth about her violent brother.
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears presents a collection of women on the verge, trying to grasp what's left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too closely. With remarkable control and transcendent talent, van den Berg dissolves, in the words of the narrator of "Slumberland," "that border between magic and annihilation," and further establishes herself as a defining fiction writer of our time.
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Laura van den Berg. (2020). I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Laura van den Berg. 2020. I Hold a Wolf By the Ears: Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf By the Ears: Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
MLA Citation (style guide)Laura van den Berg. I Hold a Wolf By the Ears: Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
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- bioText: Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, The Isle of Youth, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named one the ten best fiction books of 2020 by TIME, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indie Next pick, and was named a best book of 2018 by more than a dozen publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award and a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Born and raised in Florida, Laura splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida, with her husband and dog.
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ONE OF TIME'S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2020. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Tor.com
"As enchanting as fairy tales, as mysterious as dreams, these exquisitely composed fictions are as urgent and original as any being written today." —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction
An urgent and unsettling collection of women on the verge from Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg's first story collection since her prizewinning book The Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and the mind. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg's trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. Moving from the peculiarities of Florida to liminal spaces of travel in Mexico City, Sicily, and Iceland, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the fears we reveal to no one but ourselves.
In "Lizards," a man mutes his wife's anxieties by giving her a LaCroix-like seltzer laced with sedatives. In the title story, a woman poses as her more successful sister during a botched Italian holiday, a choice that brings about strange and destructive consequences, while in "Karolina," a woman discovers her prickly ex-sister-in-law in the aftermath of an earthquake and is forced to face the truth about her violent brother.
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears presents a collection of women on the verge, trying to grasp what's left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too closely. With remarkable control and transcendent talent, van den Berg dissolves, in the words of the narrator of "Slumberland," "that border between magic and annihilation," and further establishes herself as a defining fiction writer of our time.- reviews
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- source: Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times
- content: "The terrain of Van den Berg's difficult, beautiful and urgent new book, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, is an ecosystem of weird and stirring places you'll want to revisit, reconsider, maybe even take shelter in . . . Van den Berg feels like the writer we not only want but maybe need right now . . . Van den Berg is so consistently smart and kind, bracingly honest, keen about mental illness and crushing about everything from aging to evil that you might not be deluded in hoping that the usual order of literary fame could be reversed: that an author with respectable acclaim for her novels might earn wider recognition for a sneakily brilliant collection of stories."
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- source: John Domini, The Washington Post
- content: "[A] richness of reading pleasures brims in every one of these 11 tales . . . this book offers the greatest distillation of [van den Berg's] talents to date. To pick a best story is beyond me . . . Eye-popping description, however, is far from the only form of liveliness in these narratives. The recurring drama is that of identity lost, reinvented or both."
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Starred review from February 17, 2020
In van den Berg’s startling, precise collection (after The Third Hotel), a series of women are haunted by various disturbances, often in Florida. “Last Night” sets the tone with an unnamed narrator spooked by the sudden closure of the bar downstairs from her apartment, causing her to look back on her would-be suicide many years earlier, when, as a teenager, she spent 10 months at a lax Florida psychiatric treatment facility for her suicidal ideation. “Slumberland” follows a woman’s aimless walks outside Orlando, Fla., during which she photographs the transient residents of a seedy motel while reflecting on her own state of impermanence. In “Lizards,” a woman is outraged by news reports of a judge’s alleged sexual assaults. Her husband, skeptical and fatigued by her talking, pacifies her with a sedative-laced seltzer he finds online. “Your Second Wife” follows a woman thrust into the desperation of the gig economy who becomes a “grief freelancer,” playing the roles of widowers’ dead wives. In the title story, the collection’s thematic climax, a woman poses as her more successful sister; her actions inform the various ways that the women in van den Berg’s stories often succumb to self-erasure or are erased by others. Van den Berg maintains an unsettling tone throughout these darkly imagined tales. This collection shows the author at her best.
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May 1, 2020
In her newest short fiction collection, van den Berg (The Third Hotel) serves up an assortment of complex and satisfying not-quite-ghost stories. These deceptively dense tales often visit similar territory--women, less successful younger sisters or slightly flawed daughters, who have missed some imperceptible benchmark in life--yet there is no sense of sameness. Rather, in stories ranging from "Your Second Wife," in which a woman makes a living impersonating dead spouses, to the discomfiting "Karolina," where in the aftermath of a Mexico City earthquake a woman's homeless sister-in-law forces her to confront a buried history of family violence, van den Berg mines the broad overlap among loss, defeat, and horror with a deft touch, backlit by the unsettling effects of travel, natural disasters, death, and that thin membrane between the supernatural and the simply strange. The ghosts in her stories are her narrators' better, unachieved selves, the dread embodied in the realization of how easy it is to miss life's transitions from before to after. VERDICT These well-crafted and intelligent stories about the many ways a life can be haunted will gratify readers who enjoy perceptive, slightly gothic tales.--Lisa Peet, Library Journal
Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from June 1, 2020
After two novels, Van den Berg (The Third Hotel, 2018) returns to short stories in a richly imaginative collection that skillfully exposes vulnerable women to grief, messy relationships, misogyny, and prejudices, while equipping them with a fiery tenacity. A woman reminisces about her ominous exit from a mental institution. A photographer encounters a neighbor who caters to clients obsessed with dacryphilia (finding pleasures in the tears of others). A wife prods her reluctant husband to confront a mystery haunting his family. An irascible wife is placated with a peculiar tonic by her frustrated husband in Lizards. In Volcano House, a woman questions a wasted life while her accomplished sister lies in a coma. In Karolina, a woman reexamines her judgment of a hot-tempered brother when her ex-sister-in-law resurfaces. A gig worker experiences the hazards of working as an escort to grieving husbands disguised as their deceased wives. In the title story (taken from a Latin proverb, "Auribus teneo lupum, to be caught in an untenable situation), a stranded woman has no choice but to impersonate her AWOL sister. In these 11 perceptive stories, Van den Berg displays her literary talents with acerbic acumen as she portrays indelible characters brimming with verve that is hungry and wild.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)
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Starred review from April 15, 2020
Identity, like reality, is a slippery thing for the women in van den Berg's latest collection of short stories, all of whom are grasping at a sense of stability that seems forever out of reach. All 11 stories here are sharp as they are haunting; in this world--maybe like the real one--nothing is exactly what it seems. In "Cult of Mary," which is as short as it is devastating, a daughter takes her aging mother on a quietly gut-wrenching group tour of Italy. Against the backdrop of an earthquake-ravaged Mexico City, "Karolina" a divorcing art restorer, runs into her brother's now-destitute ex-wife and is forced to confront truths about her brother she has managed until now to willfully ignore. In "Lizards," a husband plies his unhappy wife with cans of special sparkling water, off-brand LaCroix but with sedative properties, for when she "simply becomes too much." And doesn't she also, in a way, appreciate the dulling of her own mind? "The truth is that she is angriest at her own anger," van den Berg explains, "which she suspects has arrived far too late to be of any real use." Other stories have a darkly surreal edge, like sweaty, hyper-realistic nightmares; someone has always disappeared or is in the process of disappearing: A husband vanishes into a tree; a woman is casually kidnapped by her new friend. In the title story, a woman named Margot semiaccidentally begins impersonating her missing sister at an Italian academic conference. They are raw and searching, the women at the centers of these stories. She didn't want her sister's life, Margot thinks. "All she wants is to feel like she isn't being destroyed by the world." The stories here, vibrating with loss, but wickedly funny, are a distinctly van den Berg-ian hybrid, as biting as they are dreamy. Witty, painful, and thoroughly unsettling.COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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ONE OF TIME'S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2020. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Tor.com
"As enchanting as fairy tales, as mysterious as dreams, these exquisitely composed fictions are as urgent and original as any being written today." —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction
An urgent and unsettling collection of women on the verge from Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
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