I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

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 acclaimed and prizewinning Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the thoughts we reveal to no one but ourselves.

In “Lizards,” a man mutes his wife’s anxieties by giving her a La Croix–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 violent 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 close. 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.

Praise:

“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.” ~ Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times

“[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.” ~ John Domini, The Washington Post

“Exquisite. It took a decade of writing book reviews to get here, but here we are ― I’ve used “exquisite.” The stories in Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears are exquisite . . . unsettling and bizarre, coming at you from weird angles to hit you in unexpected ways like the well-trained fists of a professional boxer.” ~ Gabino Iglesias, NPR

“The stylish, surreal stories in van den Berg’s new collection, laced with edgy comedy, offer portraits of women in despair.” ~ New York Times

“A series of melancholy meditations on death, grief and travel . . . All of the work has a dangerous, eerie charge . . . This is one of van den Berg’s strengths: The mundane becomes swiftly, surprisingly, sinister.” ~ Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis StarTribune

“A collection of dreamlike tales of womanhood that speak, however strangely, to the dark realities of modern life.” ~ Entertainment Weekly

“Laura van den Berg, a modern master of all things strange and spooky, returns to form with a new collection of mesmerizing stories about women on the brink . . . Each otherworldly story teems with surrealism and madness, straddling the familiarity of the known and the menace of the unknown, making I Hold a Wolf by the Ears one of the most unforgettable collections of the year.” ~ Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

“Laura van Den Berg has the uncanny ability to see what the rest of us cannot, and her newest story collection, the hauntingly titled I Hold A Wolf By The Ears, is a seductive, eerie plunge that subverts the mundane . . . As ever, Van Den Berg is unafraid of the fearsome, and she forces her readers to always look a little closer at the monsters within.” ~ ELLE

“van den Berg’s fantastically surreal ode to American culture in chaos, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, might stand as the benchmark short-story collection of our new decade.”~ Interview Magazine

“These disquieting, topsy-turvy tales by an ingenious author blur the borders between reality and fantasy to reveal the universal uncanniness of womanhood.” ~ O, The Oprah Magazine

“A series of eerie, unsettling shorts that seem to be founded on an arresting premise: that the way women in contemporary society experience the world is best understood as a psychological horror story . . . every uncanny happening reveals a deeper, more mundane truth about what it’s like to live as a woman in this world, pointing to a subtle undercurrent of dread that so permeates every facet of our lives we hardly notice it’s there. van den Berg’s stories amplify that feeling, forcing readers to confront it and recognize it for what it is . . . van den Berg’s writing is electrifying in the truest sense of the word: shocking, searing and illuminating.” ~ Michael Patrick Brady, WBUR (Boston)

“Van den Berg returns to short fiction in a collection of 11 stories about women and the ways in which they ache and survive…These women are haunted by specters of their past, often left unspecified by van den Berg, who instead drops references to traumatic events and lets the reader piece them together — it isn’t the event she’s interested in, but rather its echoes, and their disorienting and sublimating effects on a person’s sense of self.” ~ Buzzfeed

[I Hold a Wolf by the Ears] grabs readers by the hand and leads them through stories of sisterhood, abandonment, natural disaster, and the hatred and horror that lie at the center of a society that is stacked against women . . . van den Berg’s language is equal parts delightful and fucked up . . . van den Berg’s characters all tell their stories to you, like you’re a friend sitting with them in the bar car, landscape sliding along outside the window ignored as we lean in so no one else will hear. These stories are jagged, we open a door and we’re in them, living them; when the door clicks shuts a few pages later there is no doubt that the story is still playing out on the other side.” ~ Leah Schnelbach, tor.com

“Van den Berg is a writer of wonderous understatement. Her stories end with readers feeling they have Wile E Coyote’d their way off a cliff and are only now realizing there is no ground left beneath them. Van den Berg’s introspective narration assures she is falling with us and is just as scared to find out where we are going to land―if we are going to survive.” ~ Carl Lavigne, Ploughshares

“Startling, precise . . . Van den Berg maintains an unsettling tone throughout these darkly imagined tales. This collection shows the author at her best.” ~ Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“All 11 stories here are sharp as they are haunting; in this world―maybe like the real one―nothing is exactly what it seems. . .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.” ~ Kirkus (starred review)

“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. ” ~ Booklist (starred review)

“van den Berg serves up an assortment of complex and satisfying not–quite–ghost stories. . .These well-crafted and intelligent stories about the many ways a life can be haunted will gratify readers who enjoy perceptive, slightly gothic tales.” ~ Library Journal

“Those of us who have long been fans of Laura van den Berg’s surreal, haunting style …will be thrilled with her newest collection of short stories, a perfect embodiment of her singularly affecting voice. And those who have not yet read van den Berg? Well, you’re in for a treat. Each of these stories grapples with the difficulties of reconciling the fact of our own impermanence on this planet, and struggles with the idea that, even though transience might be a fact of life, that doesn’t prevent us from finding meaning within all the chaos.” ~ Kristin Iversen, Refinery 29

“All of the stories in this book explore relationships in a strikingly unconventional way…The writing is beautiful and the stories are some of the most peculiar I’ve ever read. ” ~ Taylor Griggs, Chicago Review of Books

“Though the stories are not linked, they belong to the same universe, in the way of comic superhero stories. And the world van den Berg has built is one of ghosts, of absurdity, of life at the edge of horror… [I Hold a Wolf by the Eats] is a conscious meditation on meaning-making, on the ways women, faced with the obliterating violence of patriarchy, assert agency, tell their own stories. Van den Berg shows a world in which women, though they may at any moment be shot, kidnapped, drugged, or driven to suicide, persist nevertheless.” ~ Jackie Hutchins, Southern Review of Books