What do you think?
Rate this book
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
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 that linger in the mouth and mind like rotten, fragrant fruit. 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 Spain, 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.
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 that linger in the mouth and mind like rotten, fragrant fruit. 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 Spain, 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.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published July 28, 2020
About the author
Laura van den Berg
27 books742 followersLaura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, 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. Laura is currently a Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard. Her next novel, State of Paradise, is forthcoming from FSG in July 2024. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 480 reviews
May 6, 2023
‘We had our whole lives in front of us — maybe. If we chose to.’
-from Last Night
‘No one here gets out alive’
-Jim Morrison
Far too many of us find ourselves tired and torn in the gears of modern society, on the verge of a breakdown or existing in the fringes of our own lives. Laura van den Berg’s third story collection, ‘I Hold a Wolf by the Ears,’ is teeming with tattered souls trying to keep themselves together as the anxieties, griefs, and fears that have become all too familiar are writ large across these eleven stories. With a cutting sense of humor and admirably polished storytelling, van den Berg brings the women in her stories to life in ways that may be surreal and surprising but always astutely human in their struggles. While the reader will feel they have ‘eavesdropped nightmares,’ there is undoubtedly a swell of empathy that will resonate from it. Through this haunting kaleidoscope of stories, there is a yearning for identity amidst the tensions and tribulations of society and it’s ableist and patriarchal enforcers that unifies the themes into one of the best collections of stories in a year where self-doubt and ethics of survival have wormed their way into everyone’s life.
‘I didn’t yet understand that refusing one kind of narrative could activate another.’
There is something so pleasing about this collection despite the sinister and often surreal events that transpire within it. Laura van den Berg is an expert storyteller and these short stories feel anything but bite size, instead succinctly weaving multiple threads together in each story in a way that creates something greater than the sum of its parts that rivals many novels ten times their length. The story The Cult of Mary--one of my favorites from the collection and one certainly deserving to be anthologized and discussed in classrooms for years to come--takes a slice-of-life moment from a tense tour of Italy to thread the lives of several tourists who are each coping with their respective griefs with a wide variety of external big issues then ties them all together with a few enviously perfect sentences all in the span of six pages.
A real authentic sense of emotion and empathy shines through these unsettling and uncanny stories. The women that populate this book are assailed by--and coping with--frustrated relationships and marriages, deaths, gaslighting, violence and other slews of griefs and they will stick with you for a long time to come. They feel like someone you know, could be yourself even. Scratch their name on the page and they might bleed. These are people trying to get by, even if it might mean running from one’s past or thinking of ‘those ghosts I killed to survive’. There are women impersonating their sister towards bizarre consequences (and a blurring line who she really is), impersonating dead wives as a job to pay the bills, befriending strangers who take them far away, escaping a bad living situation to take eerie photographs in the night (‘these are not illegal per se...but they are troubling all the same’), navigating bizarre marital tensions, or hijacking a vacation just to see a volcano because it is what they want. These quests for identity are fraught by self-doubting investigations whether their trouble are of their own making--’she can roll along for months and then be party to something so wholly fucked-up her sense of self is unsettled for a long time after, leaving her afraid of her own company, her own thoughts’--or imposed by the society at large.
What is quite admirable is the way van den Berg is able to effectively address important social issues. It doesn’t come across as an “Issues book”, but by carefully balancing them into the natural flow and logic of the stories she is able to demonstrate how so many awful aspects of society have been normalized. ‘That is how evil first creeps in,’ warns the tour guide in Cult of Mary, ‘through the falsification of beauty,’ and van den Berg examines the ways evil has already seeped into our lives.
Lizards is a stunning achievement of this. A stirring meditation on life and the briefness of human history compared to the lizard kingdom, this story features an insidious act of a husband secretly drugging his wife with sedative-laced sparkling waters. The wife has been focused on the appointment of a supreme court justice who has been accused of rape by multiple sources (she does all but directly say it is Brett Kavanaugh) and is, understandably, very angry. The husband, however, does not appreciate her anger and simply wants her to stop talking about it, as if her anger is somehow irrational. ‘Women should be angry about the violence and fear that inform so much of our lives,’ author and activist Soraya Chemaly writes in her book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, ‘so should men.’ The story is a perfect example of how women are not entitled to their own anger in our society, and how it is often used against them when they reveal anger, which is not the same as when men are enabled to show anger. ‘A society that does not respect women's anger,’ writes Chemaly, ‘is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.’
The husband buys these sedative drinks from a neighbor who openly gloats in displays on misogyny. By retaining a sense of ‘better than’ towards this neighbor, he pushes aside any feeling of actually being a misogynist, as if patriarchal enforcement over women is only something that happens overtly and not systemic in society. ‘He likes to think of himself as more evolved,’ van den Berg writes, ‘he’s a registered Democrat.’ (though he has a classist disdain for his wife walking places because ‘only poor people walked’ ). This sort of self-justification is what lets abuse perpetuate itself in society, similar to the way one can be complicit with racism without going out of their way to ‘be racist’. The result, in Lizards, becomes an unsettling parking lot scene of women half-conscious sleep walking aimlessly through the night while their husbands enjoy themselves at their expense. Slumberland has the best example of this, featuring a call-girl who cries in faux-agony on the phone for men to masturbate to--dacryphilia--which is such a bluntly perfect expression of patriarchal exploitation. In the end, despite the bad actions of men, it is women that are made to feel the shame and regret for the oppression put on them: ‘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.’
In fact, the policing of women disproportionate to the freedom of men to their own emotions appears in many stories as a source of tension. In The Pitch we watch a husband gaslight his wife, telling her to deny evidence she sees with her very own eyes and then becoming angry at her for not complying. In the titular story there is a background thread of a man running around the city serial-slapping women while in Volcano House a gunman opens fire in a park (it is pointed out ‘the police didn’t shoot John Evans on sight’ which is a subtle but effective nod at race relations as well). In this last incident, his violence is actually blamed on women in the public eye, that he ‘was disenfranchised by feminism and the alienating ways of modern life.’ The reader is right to scoff at the audacity of this, which is carefully placed halfway through a collection that demonstrates the additional perils women experience comparatively in modern life.
But van den Berg doesn’t just settle here and also explores further intersections, such as the way ableism appears. In The Cult of Mary, we find that the mother’s bad moods are in-part caused by feeling excluded from society.
Your Second Wife is such an excellent piece, reverberating with humor and social criticism that feels akin to Hilary Leichter brilliant lampooning of the gig economy in Temporary which was another of my absolute favorites from this year. A woman uses her acting skills to pose as men’s dead spouses and take them on dates for money, though--almost inevitably--this leads to a kidnapping and fight for survival. It seems everything has become commoditized--there is even a humorously passing note about a communist-themed bar because capitalism will even profit off communism--and our entire lives are pressured into being ground out in the gears of the economy that we are losing our sense of humanity.
Laura van den Berg has delivered an amazing collection with I Hold a Wolf by the Ears that feels so urgent and timely with our current state of affairs. The big issues are addressed, though it never feels preachy, and she is able to probe deep into dark affairs without it ever feeling unbearably heavy. There is such a playful humor that rings through each story and we seem to find ourselves laughing through a graveyard, aware of the darkness but emboldened to bravely trudge through and understand it. Easily one of my favorites from this year, I look forward to anything Laura van den Berg will write.
4.75/5
'I hoped she was not yet dreaming of death, but of gardeners wrapping strands of their own hair around dirt-clotted roots and fascist sheep and a life carved from a single block of wood and a man struggling to wash the shame from his feet.'
-from Last Night
‘No one here gets out alive’
-Jim Morrison
Far too many of us find ourselves tired and torn in the gears of modern society, on the verge of a breakdown or existing in the fringes of our own lives. Laura van den Berg’s third story collection, ‘I Hold a Wolf by the Ears,’ is teeming with tattered souls trying to keep themselves together as the anxieties, griefs, and fears that have become all too familiar are writ large across these eleven stories. With a cutting sense of humor and admirably polished storytelling, van den Berg brings the women in her stories to life in ways that may be surreal and surprising but always astutely human in their struggles. While the reader will feel they have ‘eavesdropped nightmares,’ there is undoubtedly a swell of empathy that will resonate from it. Through this haunting kaleidoscope of stories, there is a yearning for identity amidst the tensions and tribulations of society and it’s ableist and patriarchal enforcers that unifies the themes into one of the best collections of stories in a year where self-doubt and ethics of survival have wormed their way into everyone’s life.
‘I didn’t yet understand that refusing one kind of narrative could activate another.’
There is something so pleasing about this collection despite the sinister and often surreal events that transpire within it. Laura van den Berg is an expert storyteller and these short stories feel anything but bite size, instead succinctly weaving multiple threads together in each story in a way that creates something greater than the sum of its parts that rivals many novels ten times their length. The story The Cult of Mary--one of my favorites from the collection and one certainly deserving to be anthologized and discussed in classrooms for years to come--takes a slice-of-life moment from a tense tour of Italy to thread the lives of several tourists who are each coping with their respective griefs with a wide variety of external big issues then ties them all together with a few enviously perfect sentences all in the span of six pages.
A real authentic sense of emotion and empathy shines through these unsettling and uncanny stories. The women that populate this book are assailed by--and coping with--frustrated relationships and marriages, deaths, gaslighting, violence and other slews of griefs and they will stick with you for a long time to come. They feel like someone you know, could be yourself even. Scratch their name on the page and they might bleed. These are people trying to get by, even if it might mean running from one’s past or thinking of ‘those ghosts I killed to survive’. There are women impersonating their sister towards bizarre consequences (and a blurring line who she really is), impersonating dead wives as a job to pay the bills, befriending strangers who take them far away, escaping a bad living situation to take eerie photographs in the night (‘these are not illegal per se...but they are troubling all the same’), navigating bizarre marital tensions, or hijacking a vacation just to see a volcano because it is what they want. These quests for identity are fraught by self-doubting investigations whether their trouble are of their own making--’she can roll along for months and then be party to something so wholly fucked-up her sense of self is unsettled for a long time after, leaving her afraid of her own company, her own thoughts’--or imposed by the society at large.
What is quite admirable is the way van den Berg is able to effectively address important social issues. It doesn’t come across as an “Issues book”, but by carefully balancing them into the natural flow and logic of the stories she is able to demonstrate how so many awful aspects of society have been normalized. ‘That is how evil first creeps in,’ warns the tour guide in Cult of Mary, ‘through the falsification of beauty,’ and van den Berg examines the ways evil has already seeped into our lives.
Lizards is a stunning achievement of this. A stirring meditation on life and the briefness of human history compared to the lizard kingdom, this story features an insidious act of a husband secretly drugging his wife with sedative-laced sparkling waters. The wife has been focused on the appointment of a supreme court justice who has been accused of rape by multiple sources (she does all but directly say it is Brett Kavanaugh) and is, understandably, very angry. The husband, however, does not appreciate her anger and simply wants her to stop talking about it, as if her anger is somehow irrational. ‘Women should be angry about the violence and fear that inform so much of our lives,’ author and activist Soraya Chemaly writes in her book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, ‘so should men.’ The story is a perfect example of how women are not entitled to their own anger in our society, and how it is often used against them when they reveal anger, which is not the same as when men are enabled to show anger. ‘A society that does not respect women's anger,’ writes Chemaly, ‘is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.’
The husband buys these sedative drinks from a neighbor who openly gloats in displays on misogyny. By retaining a sense of ‘better than’ towards this neighbor, he pushes aside any feeling of actually being a misogynist, as if patriarchal enforcement over women is only something that happens overtly and not systemic in society. ‘He likes to think of himself as more evolved,’ van den Berg writes, ‘he’s a registered Democrat.’ (though he has a classist disdain for his wife walking places because ‘only poor people walked’ ). This sort of self-justification is what lets abuse perpetuate itself in society, similar to the way one can be complicit with racism without going out of their way to ‘be racist’. The result, in Lizards, becomes an unsettling parking lot scene of women half-conscious sleep walking aimlessly through the night while their husbands enjoy themselves at their expense. Slumberland has the best example of this, featuring a call-girl who cries in faux-agony on the phone for men to masturbate to--dacryphilia--which is such a bluntly perfect expression of patriarchal exploitation. In the end, despite the bad actions of men, it is women that are made to feel the shame and regret for the oppression put on them: ‘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.’
In fact, the policing of women disproportionate to the freedom of men to their own emotions appears in many stories as a source of tension. In The Pitch we watch a husband gaslight his wife, telling her to deny evidence she sees with her very own eyes and then becoming angry at her for not complying. In the titular story there is a background thread of a man running around the city serial-slapping women while in Volcano House a gunman opens fire in a park (it is pointed out ‘the police didn’t shoot John Evans on sight’ which is a subtle but effective nod at race relations as well). In this last incident, his violence is actually blamed on women in the public eye, that he ‘was disenfranchised by feminism and the alienating ways of modern life.’ The reader is right to scoff at the audacity of this, which is carefully placed halfway through a collection that demonstrates the additional perils women experience comparatively in modern life.
But van den Berg doesn’t just settle here and also explores further intersections, such as the way ableism appears. In The Cult of Mary, we find that the mother’s bad moods are in-part caused by feeling excluded from society.
‘we both knew that she was too frail to be touring Italy and our shared knowledge of her weakness made her enraged by her own body, which in turn made her enraged by all the places that had no interest in accommodating bodies such as hers.’Overall, van den Berg seems to address how all these sources of frustration, shame, guilt, violence, etc. are all lurking under the umbrella of neoliberalism. Life has become an extension of the economy and those who do not fit its hyper-specific desires are regulated into the shame chambers. ‘This is the problem with the gig economy,’ the narrator of Your Second Wife thinks, examining that the rules of ‘civilized behavior’ have crumbled under the weight of society: ‘we have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy.
Your Second Wife is such an excellent piece, reverberating with humor and social criticism that feels akin to Hilary Leichter brilliant lampooning of the gig economy in Temporary which was another of my absolute favorites from this year. A woman uses her acting skills to pose as men’s dead spouses and take them on dates for money, though--almost inevitably--this leads to a kidnapping and fight for survival. It seems everything has become commoditized--there is even a humorously passing note about a communist-themed bar because capitalism will even profit off communism--and our entire lives are pressured into being ground out in the gears of the economy that we are losing our sense of humanity.
‘The system is designed to keep us so depleted that we forget our sense of decency and become so mercenary about our own survival that we have nothing left to contribute to the common good.’This is a plea to be aware of what has befallen us, to pay attention to our relationships and not submit to the role of oppressor simply because society deems it acceptable, and to address our own survival with the survival of all in mind.
Laura van den Berg has delivered an amazing collection with I Hold a Wolf by the Ears that feels so urgent and timely with our current state of affairs. The big issues are addressed, though it never feels preachy, and she is able to probe deep into dark affairs without it ever feeling unbearably heavy. There is such a playful humor that rings through each story and we seem to find ourselves laughing through a graveyard, aware of the darkness but emboldened to bravely trudge through and understand it. Easily one of my favorites from this year, I look forward to anything Laura van den Berg will write.
4.75/5
'I hoped she was not yet dreaming of death, but of gardeners wrapping strands of their own hair around dirt-clotted roots and fascist sheep and a life carved from a single block of wood and a man struggling to wash the shame from his feet.'
June 9, 2020
When it comes to dark, twisted writing, Laura van den Berg is clearly a master: This book is disturbing and funny, surreal and all-too-real, fearless and terrifying. In eleven short stories, the author illuminates the female experience, highlighting certain aspects and phenomena by giving the texts a surreal edge. While the storylines are often slightly meandering (hello, The Third Hotel), the texts are not build in a traditional manner; rather, they are structured around pivotal incidents and observations that make up the core of the individual stories, and everything else that is happening is grouped around this core. Many themes and motifs appear again and again throughout the whole collection, like doppelgängers, running away/fleeing, killers and their victims, death and loss, toxic masculinity, overpowering natural forces (earthquake, volcano etc.), animals, and family, especially siblings.
The book opens with the sentence: "I want to tell you about the night I got hit by a train and died" - and such well-placed, gripping sentences are an important element of van den Berg's narrative strategy. In the stories, we meet (among others) a woman who, after an earthquake, runs into her beloved brother's ex-wife and learns to accept that he was a perpetrator of domestic violence; there's a young actress who starts a business by offering to impersonate deceased wives for their widowers; a wife is secretly drugged by her husband; a female illustrator paints a surreal ballet troupe comprised of animals behind her furniture (you just have to love this idea!); and a couple confronts the losses of the past while watching their daughter die.
Van den Berg takes her readers to all kinds of places, from Florida to Sicily, Spain, Mexico City, as well as - two of my favorite places in the world that generally do not feature enough in literature - to Minneapolis and Reykjavik. But unlike in Lauren Groff's Florida, for example, the sense of place is not defining for the scenes depicted; rather, the characters are caught up in themselves and roam (often foreign) places, drifting through spaces and psychological states, trying to balance inside and outside world.
I have great admiration for van den Berg's daring poetic concept and her sensibilities for all things strange and weird: She never relies on pure effects (unlike The Dominant Animal: Stories, which is marketed similarly and can't compete at all), there is always subtlety and more than one smart thought buried behind under unsettling ideas. Still, I have to admit that I tend to struggle with meandering textual structures and prefer more stringent compositions - but this is not what van den Berg is intending to do here, and I won't hold my personal taste against her. Maybe it would also have been better to not read the whole thing in two days - the stories need more room to breathe, but I am not one to ration books over longer periods of time.
Van den Berg is one of the most interesting writers around, and while I'm probably not her ideal reader, I absolutely recommend checking out her texts.
The book opens with the sentence: "I want to tell you about the night I got hit by a train and died" - and such well-placed, gripping sentences are an important element of van den Berg's narrative strategy. In the stories, we meet (among others) a woman who, after an earthquake, runs into her beloved brother's ex-wife and learns to accept that he was a perpetrator of domestic violence; there's a young actress who starts a business by offering to impersonate deceased wives for their widowers; a wife is secretly drugged by her husband; a female illustrator paints a surreal ballet troupe comprised of animals behind her furniture (you just have to love this idea!); and a couple confronts the losses of the past while watching their daughter die.
Van den Berg takes her readers to all kinds of places, from Florida to Sicily, Spain, Mexico City, as well as - two of my favorite places in the world that generally do not feature enough in literature - to Minneapolis and Reykjavik. But unlike in Lauren Groff's Florida, for example, the sense of place is not defining for the scenes depicted; rather, the characters are caught up in themselves and roam (often foreign) places, drifting through spaces and psychological states, trying to balance inside and outside world.
I have great admiration for van den Berg's daring poetic concept and her sensibilities for all things strange and weird: She never relies on pure effects (unlike The Dominant Animal: Stories, which is marketed similarly and can't compete at all), there is always subtlety and more than one smart thought buried behind under unsettling ideas. Still, I have to admit that I tend to struggle with meandering textual structures and prefer more stringent compositions - but this is not what van den Berg is intending to do here, and I won't hold my personal taste against her. Maybe it would also have been better to not read the whole thing in two days - the stories need more room to breathe, but I am not one to ration books over longer periods of time.
Van den Berg is one of the most interesting writers around, and while I'm probably not her ideal reader, I absolutely recommend checking out her texts.
August 27, 2020
The stories in Laura van den Berg’s latest collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, are variations on a theme, typically containing: a young to middle-aged woman as protagonist; the loss of a child, parent or sibling; terse relationships with siblings, spouses, or in-laws; foreign travel (with safety-rails-on); gig-work and/or side hustle, ranging from the normal (pet photographer) to the bizarre (dead spouse impersonator-for-hire).
Even with these looping patterns, the collection doesn’t get repetitive—at least it didn’t for me, and it probably helped that I stretched my reading over a few weeks. There’s a sense that a particular malaise is consistently affecting these women, in ways psychological and economic.
One story takes place with the televised Kavanaugh hearings in the background; another references media coverage of the Claremont Killer here in Australia. This low ambient hum of misogyny and violence occasionally rises to centre stage, but at other times van den Berg’s women are simply worn down or numbed by it. They become walking clouds of repressed emotion and/or fretful unease, past caring about keeping up appearances and without the requisite energy to summon rage.
These stories are more straightforward and accessible than van den Berg’s last novel, The Third Hotel, a book I found frustratingly oblique. They teeter on a precipice of realism, as if at any moment the story may topple over the edge into something far weirder and woollier—it usually doesn’t but the possibility keeps you gripped. Likewise, the characters are precariously balanced on their own tipping points, while van den Berg holds a note of sustained tension longer than seems possible. A collection that is both very good and very now. 4 stars.
Even with these looping patterns, the collection doesn’t get repetitive—at least it didn’t for me, and it probably helped that I stretched my reading over a few weeks. There’s a sense that a particular malaise is consistently affecting these women, in ways psychological and economic.
One story takes place with the televised Kavanaugh hearings in the background; another references media coverage of the Claremont Killer here in Australia. This low ambient hum of misogyny and violence occasionally rises to centre stage, but at other times van den Berg’s women are simply worn down or numbed by it. They become walking clouds of repressed emotion and/or fretful unease, past caring about keeping up appearances and without the requisite energy to summon rage.
These stories are more straightforward and accessible than van den Berg’s last novel, The Third Hotel, a book I found frustratingly oblique. They teeter on a precipice of realism, as if at any moment the story may topple over the edge into something far weirder and woollier—it usually doesn’t but the possibility keeps you gripped. Likewise, the characters are precariously balanced on their own tipping points, while van den Berg holds a note of sustained tension longer than seems possible. A collection that is both very good and very now. 4 stars.
July 18, 2020
I adored this! These stories were often sad, sometimes creepy, always impeccably structured. Van den Berg tells her stories unchronologically, often circularly, but always in a way that feels very deliberate and I appreciated this. The stories are told with a conscious darkness but never feel hopeless. Van den Berg focusses on characters that seem unmoored but are still anchored by something, often a sibling (I adore this!). Even when the subject matter is dark (and it is!) it never felt gratuitous or unnecessary to me.
I did enjoy the first half of the book more, but even the stories that did not completely work for me were never a chore to read. I am very happy to have two more short story collections of hers ahead of me as collections that work this well for me are rare.
I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
I did enjoy the first half of the book more, but even the stories that did not completely work for me were never a chore to read. I am very happy to have two more short story collections of hers ahead of me as collections that work this well for me are rare.
I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
August 8, 2020
These stories all follow women at pivotal points in their lives. Unlike slice of life short stories, the pivotal variety can be problematic, but these are so well crafted, they lodge in the mind. But they are also slippery, and these women, not all of whom are relatable or likeable, are truly original and make for twisty reading. Usually there are a few entries in collections that lower the experience, making it difficult to complete. But this is one of those rare cases in which each story is original. Laura van den Berg has a rich legacy of work, and she's definitely become one of my go-to's.
August 18, 2020
It's not surprising that 'Last Night' comes first in this collection, as most readers would find it difficult to resist an opening line like this: 'I want to tell you about the night I got hit by a train and died. The thing is—it never happened.' The rest of the story, perhaps inevitably, fails to live up to that attention-grabbing opening, and I found the resolution unsatisfactorily glib. A similar problem afflicts several others: 'Hill of Hell' (which has a fantastic first couple of pages and a disappointing everything else), 'Cult of Mary', 'Lizards' and 'Volcano House'. Some of these feature interesting details (for example the mind-altering sparkling water in 'Lizards') which are, disappointingly, not the focus of the story. Others have a meandering style which seems to me better suited to long-form fiction; the plot of 'Volcano House' has enough material for a novel.
'Slumberland' is a standout. I would describe it as a story version of the work of certain American photographers, such as Gregory Crewdson and Todd Hido, who capture eerie images of small towns and suburbs in silent, transitional hours. The narrator is herself a photographer of such scenes; the nighttime atmosphere is wonderful, but the most memorable element is the narrator's meeting with her neighbour, a woman who cries all night, every night (you'll never guess why).
The other three stories I really liked all have similarities with the author's most recent novel, The Third Hotel, which I loved. In both 'Karolina' and 'I Hold a Wolf by the Ears' the protagonists travel abroad (Mexico City and Sicily, respectively) for a conference and have unexpected encounters. In 'The Pitch' a woman discovers something strange about her husband after spotting a hidden figure in the background of a photograph. All three reminded me of the myriad layers of van den Berg's storytelling in The Third Hotel, the distinctive turns her plotting can take. 'Karolina' is the most satisfying, 'I Hold a Wolf by the Ears' pleasingly surreal, and 'The Pitch' a great weird/ghost story.
A couple of stories are absurd in a way that skirts the edges of fantasy. 'Friends' follows Sarah as she attempts to build a social life in a 'city of medium size, the worst size for making friends'. She ends up with the bizarre Holly, who takes her on a mysterious trip. 'Your Second Wife' is about a woman who earns a living impersonating dead wives. I feel like I have come across this concept in a story before, but I can't for the life of me think where; perhaps I'm just thinking of something like Temporary, which, like van den Berg's story, is a satire of the gig economy. Both stories feel rather out of place among the others.
Overall, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is a difficult one to rate. While I loved the style and description, most of the themes and characters weren't to my taste; ultimately I only really enjoyed four out of the eleven stories in the book, and doubt I will remember even those very well. I think van den Berg is an excellent writer and I would certainly read another of her novels; this collection, however, spoke to me only intermittently.
TinyLetter | Linktree
'Slumberland' is a standout. I would describe it as a story version of the work of certain American photographers, such as Gregory Crewdson and Todd Hido, who capture eerie images of small towns and suburbs in silent, transitional hours. The narrator is herself a photographer of such scenes; the nighttime atmosphere is wonderful, but the most memorable element is the narrator's meeting with her neighbour, a woman who cries all night, every night (you'll never guess why).
The other three stories I really liked all have similarities with the author's most recent novel, The Third Hotel, which I loved. In both 'Karolina' and 'I Hold a Wolf by the Ears' the protagonists travel abroad (Mexico City and Sicily, respectively) for a conference and have unexpected encounters. In 'The Pitch' a woman discovers something strange about her husband after spotting a hidden figure in the background of a photograph. All three reminded me of the myriad layers of van den Berg's storytelling in The Third Hotel, the distinctive turns her plotting can take. 'Karolina' is the most satisfying, 'I Hold a Wolf by the Ears' pleasingly surreal, and 'The Pitch' a great weird/ghost story.
A couple of stories are absurd in a way that skirts the edges of fantasy. 'Friends' follows Sarah as she attempts to build a social life in a 'city of medium size, the worst size for making friends'. She ends up with the bizarre Holly, who takes her on a mysterious trip. 'Your Second Wife' is about a woman who earns a living impersonating dead wives. I feel like I have come across this concept in a story before, but I can't for the life of me think where; perhaps I'm just thinking of something like Temporary, which, like van den Berg's story, is a satire of the gig economy. Both stories feel rather out of place among the others.
Overall, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is a difficult one to rate. While I loved the style and description, most of the themes and characters weren't to my taste; ultimately I only really enjoyed four out of the eleven stories in the book, and doubt I will remember even those very well. I think van den Berg is an excellent writer and I would certainly read another of her novels; this collection, however, spoke to me only intermittently.
TinyLetter | Linktree
October 30, 2020
This is ridiculous. This is ridiculously good.
What an unsettling way to explore the human psyche. Let's put it this way: I am a stan for life + I need to read her entire bibliography. I need it in my system. It's kinda bothering me that she isn't more well known. Why aren't her publishers pushing her work more? I don't get it.
Aaaaaaah, this is a fkn outstanding collection. Not a bad seed in the bunch.
Favorite stories (in this order):
Lizards
Karolina
Slumberland
The Pitch
Last Night
What an unsettling way to explore the human psyche. Let's put it this way: I am a stan for life + I need to read her entire bibliography. I need it in my system. It's kinda bothering me that she isn't more well known. Why aren't her publishers pushing her work more? I don't get it.
Aaaaaaah, this is a fkn outstanding collection. Not a bad seed in the bunch.
Favorite stories (in this order):
Lizards
Karolina
Slumberland
The Pitch
Last Night
June 22, 2020
Laura van den Berg's collection didn't connect with me. It feels to me as I read that there is a deliberate flat tone at work here, where the narrators of each story are unreflectively reporting events in the voice of a clinically depressed person. I felt held at arms-length. I was never really let into the story. This is extremely artful, yet very careful writing, where the author is trying to recreate the mimetic impression of casual conversation. I kept wanting to say: hey, Laura! Let go a little! Let your narrative voice become ridiculously gothic for a change, or interior, or just, something other than this cool detached voice...this reader at least would love to see this talented writer reach for more and varied ways to tell her stories.
January 30, 2021
The interesting thing about contemporary short stories is how willing they are to mess with expectations, pull gift-wrap ribbons, say, "Look over there!" and then disappear when your head is turned.
Exhibit A through G-Whiz, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, offers Laura van den Berg as a good example of this. Beginning, middle, end? How about beginning, middle, middle? Sometimes the narrative just goes off a cliff. You know. Like Wiley Coyote.
Van den Berg must travel a lot, because the settings vary from Maine to Mexico to the Mediterranean.
The protagonists vary, too, but they are reliably female, lost, confused, in danger, dealing with family issues, or whatever other roadblock slash detour slash stop sign you want to deal with.
The variety helped. The writing is concise. And you might find yourself turning pages to find out what doesn't / won't / can't happen.
Frustrated by that? Follow it up with a Victorian novel. Everything will come together nicely, I promise.
Exhibit A through G-Whiz, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, offers Laura van den Berg as a good example of this. Beginning, middle, end? How about beginning, middle, middle? Sometimes the narrative just goes off a cliff. You know. Like Wiley Coyote.
Van den Berg must travel a lot, because the settings vary from Maine to Mexico to the Mediterranean.
The protagonists vary, too, but they are reliably female, lost, confused, in danger, dealing with family issues, or whatever other roadblock slash detour slash stop sign you want to deal with.
The variety helped. The writing is concise. And you might find yourself turning pages to find out what doesn't / won't / can't happen.
Frustrated by that? Follow it up with a Victorian novel. Everything will come together nicely, I promise.
July 31, 2020
This short story collection, "I Hold a Wolf by the Ears" really blew my expectations. I've never read anything from Laura van den Berg before so I wasn't sure what to expect. What a pleasant surprise! I absolutely love her writing style. Such beautiful and vivid imagery. The dialogue is crisp and the characters are multi-dimensional. I was completely sucked in, I didn't want this collection to end. There's 11 stories in total, and I can honestly say there's no filler here. Even the short stories like, "Cult of Mary", and "Friends" delivered on every level. A lot of the stories deal with grief and trauma like, "Last Night", "Slumberland", "Hill of Hell", and "Volcano House". Rich in emotion and sentiment which isn't easy to do with short narratives. Some stories are eerie and delightfully weird like, "The Pitch" and "Lizards". My favorite story is "Karolina" - about a woman who stumbles upon her ex-sister-in-law living on the streets in Mexico City. I highly recommend this intelligent and entertaining book!
Thank you, Netgalley and FSG for the digital ARC.
Release date: July 28, 2020
Thank you, Netgalley and FSG for the digital ARC.
Release date: July 28, 2020
September 10, 2021
'Trzymam wilka za uszy' pręchiuchno wbiło się w moje top 3 Pauz. A sprawa wcale nie wyglądała tak obiecująco. Początkowo kompletnie nie miałam tego zbioru w planach - psychodeliczne okładki z reguły bardziej mnie odstraszają niż przyciągają. Coś tam miało się dziać nadludzkiego, a ja od tego typu motywów stronię (wiecie, życie to jest to, codzienność się liczy!), więc zbiór ten powinien mi kompletnie umknąć. Ale przesyłka przyszła (@wydawnictwo_pauza dziękuję! 🙏), przeczytałam opis na czwartej stronie okładki (miało być o kobietach!), no i zaczęłam. Od razu! I słuchajcie, przepadłam! Cóż za wspaniały zbiór!
Laura van den Berg zrobiła coś niesamowitego. Zebrała kobiety, w których życiu pojawia się jakaś niemoc, i nadała ich historiom (wątkom, epizodom, wycinkom ich historii życia) jakiś drobny element surrealistyczny. Ale ten element, mimo że absurdalny i magiczny, nadaje tym opowieściom autentyczności. Ubarwia, ożywia, nadaje znaczenia - ta kobieta wie, co to empatia, wie, co to zrozumienie, wie, co to lęk, ba! wie, czego potrzebuje jej czytelniczka. Ma niesamowitą wyobraźnię i ogromną umiejętność rysowania swoich bohaterek. Komunikowania ich potrzeb, uzewnętrzniania ich myśli i budowania ich wypowiedzi. Jest wspaniałą opowiadaczką, czyta się ją znakomicie, a jej bohaterki wydają się momentami niepokojąco (ale i kojąco) znajome. To kobiety udręczone: żalem, niesatysfakcjonującą relacją, oschłością otoczenia, stratą, wspomnieniami, niezrozumieniem, jawnym, absurdalnym, odrzuceniem, traumą, przypadkowo zawiązaną niestosowną relacją, toksyczną męskością. Kobiety świadome, otwarte. Obserwujące otoczenie, analizujące codzienność, żądne, ale i pełne niepokoju.
To bardzo życiowe, ludzkie, kobiece opowiadania. Nie ma w nich powtarzalności, sztampowości, przewidywalności. Do tego napisane w ten sposób, że trudno przy tym zbiorze napisać najbardziej kliszowe zdanie dotyczące opowiadań: jedne opo podobały mi się bardziej, inne mnie. Nie! Każde z tych 11 opowiadań było znakomite. Czy mam swoje ulubione? Mam, ale nie wykluczam rotacji, bo jestem bardziej niż pewna, że do tych opowiadań wrócę.
Laura van den Berg zrobiła coś niesamowitego. Zebrała kobiety, w których życiu pojawia się jakaś niemoc, i nadała ich historiom (wątkom, epizodom, wycinkom ich historii życia) jakiś drobny element surrealistyczny. Ale ten element, mimo że absurdalny i magiczny, nadaje tym opowieściom autentyczności. Ubarwia, ożywia, nadaje znaczenia - ta kobieta wie, co to empatia, wie, co to zrozumienie, wie, co to lęk, ba! wie, czego potrzebuje jej czytelniczka. Ma niesamowitą wyobraźnię i ogromną umiejętność rysowania swoich bohaterek. Komunikowania ich potrzeb, uzewnętrzniania ich myśli i budowania ich wypowiedzi. Jest wspaniałą opowiadaczką, czyta się ją znakomicie, a jej bohaterki wydają się momentami niepokojąco (ale i kojąco) znajome. To kobiety udręczone: żalem, niesatysfakcjonującą relacją, oschłością otoczenia, stratą, wspomnieniami, niezrozumieniem, jawnym, absurdalnym, odrzuceniem, traumą, przypadkowo zawiązaną niestosowną relacją, toksyczną męskością. Kobiety świadome, otwarte. Obserwujące otoczenie, analizujące codzienność, żądne, ale i pełne niepokoju.
To bardzo życiowe, ludzkie, kobiece opowiadania. Nie ma w nich powtarzalności, sztampowości, przewidywalności. Do tego napisane w ten sposób, że trudno przy tym zbiorze napisać najbardziej kliszowe zdanie dotyczące opowiadań: jedne opo podobały mi się bardziej, inne mnie. Nie! Każde z tych 11 opowiadań było znakomite. Czy mam swoje ulubione? Mam, ale nie wykluczam rotacji, bo jestem bardziej niż pewna, że do tych opowiadań wrócę.
May 13, 2021
Laura van den Berg, queen of liminality.
No need to tell you which stories were my favorite. They’re all equally good. Equally excellent. Read them all!
No need to tell you which stories were my favorite. They’re all equally good. Equally excellent. Read them all!
December 13, 2020
A short quick read of short stories they seem to be too short to complete the thoughts behind the story. It's easy to get going, like the first line from “Last Night,” the book’s first story: “I want to tell you about the night I got hit by a train and died. The thing is — it never happened.” It seems that from the catchy first line the stories stay ...shortly stagnant.
January 1, 2020
I did not give Laura consent to devastate me like this.
(Comprehensive review to come.)
(Comprehensive review to come.)
December 12, 2020
This is my favorite short story collection of the year, no question. Van Den Berg has created a surreal, chilling, and often bleak world in this book, telling the stories of haunted women as they traverse grief, trauma, and violence from men. Van Den Berg writes with such precision and thought that it is clear that every word of this book was considered to make the most of the short form. Her sentences are precise and captivating, pulling you into each story immediately and not letting you loose until she decides to. The best example of this is the first story “Last Night,” which opens with “I want to tell you about the night I got hit by a train and died.” Even better, the following sentence is “The thing is - it never happened.”
Each story is unique in its approach yet feels grounded in cohesiveness. Van Den Berg is not afraid to constantly surprise her readers, and her narrative choices work wonders to leave a deep imprint on your mind with each story. Even for some short story collections that I love, I can forget the details of individual stories yet appreciate it overall. This is not the case here - every story is unforgettable and punches you in the face. While this is the only book I have by her, I cannot wait to read everything she has written and eagerly await her next work.
Each story is unique in its approach yet feels grounded in cohesiveness. Van Den Berg is not afraid to constantly surprise her readers, and her narrative choices work wonders to leave a deep imprint on your mind with each story. Even for some short story collections that I love, I can forget the details of individual stories yet appreciate it overall. This is not the case here - every story is unforgettable and punches you in the face. While this is the only book I have by her, I cannot wait to read everything she has written and eagerly await her next work.
July 13, 2020
Auribus teneo lupum and all that.
disclaimer: I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for review consideration. All of the opinions presented below are my own. Quotes have been taken from the advanced copy and are subject to change upon publication.
It may be the first work I've read by Laura van den Berg, but this collection absolutely gutted me. Almost every story was devastating to some extent, often in ways I wasn't expecting. The stories all feel properly connected and seem like they are occurring in the same universe, happening to similar people. van den Berg allows the women she writes to be flawed human beings and doesn't pull any punches. They do and think bad things, but they're always sympathetic -- and fascinating to read about. There's a lot of commentary on grief, trauma, and gender, and I urge readers to tread lightly and to look up content warnings if necessary. I've included an incomplete list below. On the whole, I was incredibly impressed by this collection and will be looking to read more of van den Berg's work.
-Last Night, 3.5 stars
-Slumberland, 5 stars
-Hill of Hell, 4 stars
-Cult of Mary, 2 stars
-Lizards, 4 stars
-The Pitch, 4 stars
-Volcano House, 3.5 stars
-Friends, 4 stars
-Karolina, 4 stars
-Your Second Wife, 4 stars
-I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, 3.5 stars
average: 3.77 stars, rounded up to 4
content warnings: sexual assault; loss of a loved one; domestic abuse; mass shootings; miscarriages; kidnapping; attempted suicide.
Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Ko-fi
July 24, 2020
"Auribus teneo lupum". Latin for "I hold a wolf by the ears".
To be in a difficult situation from which it is as dangerous to extricate oneself as it is to remain in it. I'm afraid we're holding a wolf by the ears regarding our current healthcare system.
Another way to look at it is "a dilemma that has no easy way out".
Eleven short stories.
All describe dilemmas for which there is no easy way out.
Wonderful in terms of style, content and travelling opportunities. Oh yes, some historical tidbits thrown in for good measure.
I especially enjoyed the VERY unusual occupations described in some of the stories. The travelling to Italy, Mexico and mentions of Florida were also all to my liking.
If you are a short story lover, you will love these. And if you are not, maybe, by reading these, you will become a convert.
5 stars
To be in a difficult situation from which it is as dangerous to extricate oneself as it is to remain in it. I'm afraid we're holding a wolf by the ears regarding our current healthcare system.
Another way to look at it is "a dilemma that has no easy way out".
Eleven short stories.
All describe dilemmas for which there is no easy way out.
Wonderful in terms of style, content and travelling opportunities. Oh yes, some historical tidbits thrown in for good measure.
I especially enjoyed the VERY unusual occupations described in some of the stories. The travelling to Italy, Mexico and mentions of Florida were also all to my liking.
If you are a short story lover, you will love these. And if you are not, maybe, by reading these, you will become a convert.
5 stars
March 23, 2022
Jak to często w przypadku zbiorów opowiadań bywa, niektóre spodobały mi się bardzo, a niektóre w ogóle. Każda historia przepełniona jest lękiem pochodzących z różnych źródeł, ale w centrum zawsze znajduje się kobiecoś i kobieca perspektywa. Jestem pewien, że niektóre opowiadania i motywy zostaną ze mną na dłużej.
January 18, 2020
I honestly can't recommend reading this and anything else she does enough. She's one of the best short story writers out there.
December 19, 2020
I decided to read this because of my Intermediate Fiction Writing course. We had a creative semester project involving book reviews of short story collections and many of my peers highly recommended this one. Man was I sorely disappointed. One peer said that Van Den Berg’s writing was beautiful and metaphor heavy but that that was all. I should have listened.
I expected quite a lot and I suppose that’s why I’m so disappointed. I expected stories of women dealing with issue that we all deal with and coping with these issues mixed with supernatural/horror elements. What I got was a beautifully written collection of purple prose. Van Den Berg creates these stunning images and metaphors but that is about it. There isn’t anything else beneath the beautiful source. I think one of the common things my peers noted about this collection was its “brilliant” portrayal of imperfect and “realistic” women. I think that’s an inaccurate view of the characters. The protagonists in each story aren’t realistic in any sense. Yes, they’re not likable and yes they are imperfect. Does that necessarily make them realistic? I don’t think so. All of the characters fell very flat for me and I think a part of why that happened is because none of the characters felt like people; they didn’t have discerning characteristics or quirks that set them apart from the other stories’ protagonists. I had to actively remind myself that the protagonist of each story was a different character, not the same character from the first story in the collection. While it’s great to read stories of realistically imperfect women, this collection just missed the mark on that.
Without getting TOO into it, I just felt very let down by this collection. Like I said, if I didn’t think too hard about it, the writing is fine. Unfortunately for my English Literature/Creative Writing academic ass, I can’t not read without thinking too hard about what I’m reading. I definitely wouldn’t recommend this one unfortunately.
I expected quite a lot and I suppose that’s why I’m so disappointed. I expected stories of women dealing with issue that we all deal with and coping with these issues mixed with supernatural/horror elements. What I got was a beautifully written collection of purple prose. Van Den Berg creates these stunning images and metaphors but that is about it. There isn’t anything else beneath the beautiful source. I think one of the common things my peers noted about this collection was its “brilliant” portrayal of imperfect and “realistic” women. I think that’s an inaccurate view of the characters. The protagonists in each story aren’t realistic in any sense. Yes, they’re not likable and yes they are imperfect. Does that necessarily make them realistic? I don’t think so. All of the characters fell very flat for me and I think a part of why that happened is because none of the characters felt like people; they didn’t have discerning characteristics or quirks that set them apart from the other stories’ protagonists. I had to actively remind myself that the protagonist of each story was a different character, not the same character from the first story in the collection. While it’s great to read stories of realistically imperfect women, this collection just missed the mark on that.
Without getting TOO into it, I just felt very let down by this collection. Like I said, if I didn’t think too hard about it, the writing is fine. Unfortunately for my English Literature/Creative Writing academic ass, I can’t not read without thinking too hard about what I’m reading. I definitely wouldn’t recommend this one unfortunately.
January 23, 2020
I don't think I've ever read a story collection in which every story is told in the first person. It's interesting, as you automatically think it's the same character every story, which of course doesn't have to be the case. I liked it and it made me race throught the stories (as it normally takes me months to read a story collection), each one fascinating and well written.
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Edelweiss for the ARC
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Edelweiss for the ARC
December 24, 2021
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is an atmospheric, thrillingly dynamic and compulsively readable short story collection that ruminates on themes of identity, violence against women, duality, responses to trauma and longing. That's a lot to pack into 201 pages, especially when the stories in those pages are comprised of brief and often fragmented narratives but Laura Van den Berg impressively pulls it off with only a few exceptions.
All of these tales focus on women in unusual and confounding situations that challenge them and the reader in many ways. The ideas at the heart of these stories are creative and often riveting. Though the narrative voice remains pretty homogenous throughout, the setting and conflict for each is distinct and intriguing while maintaining a cohesive air of mystery and menace. The stories start in Florida and take the reader all the way from Australia to Rome to Mexico City. I particularly enjoyed the more transportive tales like Volcano House which takes place in the treeless tundra of Iceland. Karolina and the titular tale took place in Mexico and Italy respectively and they were highlights as well. The one stinker that stood out, to me, was Friends but it was also one of the shortest which probably has something to do with my underwhelmed reaction to it. Though, even my feelings toward that one were more apathy than antipathy.
Laura van den Berg's writing was undeniably inspired and inventive but it sometimes meandered a bit into clunky execution that felt rushed or nonsensical. Some of the compelling and creative ideas she created felt like they deserved a bit more consideration or maybe just a healthier page count but perhaps that is simply down to the nature of short form fiction?
The prose felt a little uneven at times. At one moment, the author would hook me with a clever concept or propulsive event before losing me slightly with an arbitrary anecdote that seemed to lead nowhere or toward a too-easy resolution that verged on unbelievable. In a passage where the events unfolding became too unlikely and conveniently coincidental she cleverly brought up the idea that fact is often stranger than fiction and lamented that in telling the truth you inevitably wind up sounding like a liar. I loved this meta moment in the story and it perfectly exemplified the emotional tug-of-war that sometimes thwarted my enjoyment of this book.
However, upon finishing the whole collection, the sum of its parts easily won out and I would definitely recommend it to any fans of short stories or literary fiction. I am relatively new to this form and likely suffering from a few growing pains in that process but even I can tell that this collection is uncommonly captivating and brilliantly beguiling.
All of these tales focus on women in unusual and confounding situations that challenge them and the reader in many ways. The ideas at the heart of these stories are creative and often riveting. Though the narrative voice remains pretty homogenous throughout, the setting and conflict for each is distinct and intriguing while maintaining a cohesive air of mystery and menace. The stories start in Florida and take the reader all the way from Australia to Rome to Mexico City. I particularly enjoyed the more transportive tales like Volcano House which takes place in the treeless tundra of Iceland. Karolina and the titular tale took place in Mexico and Italy respectively and they were highlights as well. The one stinker that stood out, to me, was Friends but it was also one of the shortest which probably has something to do with my underwhelmed reaction to it. Though, even my feelings toward that one were more apathy than antipathy.
Laura van den Berg's writing was undeniably inspired and inventive but it sometimes meandered a bit into clunky execution that felt rushed or nonsensical. Some of the compelling and creative ideas she created felt like they deserved a bit more consideration or maybe just a healthier page count but perhaps that is simply down to the nature of short form fiction?
The prose felt a little uneven at times. At one moment, the author would hook me with a clever concept or propulsive event before losing me slightly with an arbitrary anecdote that seemed to lead nowhere or toward a too-easy resolution that verged on unbelievable. In a passage where the events unfolding became too unlikely and conveniently coincidental she cleverly brought up the idea that fact is often stranger than fiction and lamented that in telling the truth you inevitably wind up sounding like a liar. I loved this meta moment in the story and it perfectly exemplified the emotional tug-of-war that sometimes thwarted my enjoyment of this book.
However, upon finishing the whole collection, the sum of its parts easily won out and I would definitely recommend it to any fans of short stories or literary fiction. I am relatively new to this form and likely suffering from a few growing pains in that process but even I can tell that this collection is uncommonly captivating and brilliantly beguiling.
September 12, 2021
Do czytania opowiadań musiałam czytelniczo dojrzeć. Jeszcze kilka lat temu było tak, że im dłuższa książka, tym chętniej po nią sięgałam. Lubiłam rozbudowane fabuły, dzięki którym mogłam bardziej zanurzyć się w historii i przywiązać do bohaterow. A opowiadania? Ale po co to komu! Teraz wielkie tomiszcza mnie przerazaja i ze zgrozą patrzę na ksiazki powyżej 400 stron. Mam też momenty, kiedy ciągnie mnie do bardzo krótkiej formy, zwłaszcza kiedy jestem zmęczona czy przebodźcowana, a opowiadania pozwalają mi na niezobowiązujące czytanie. Problemem tylko to, że bardzo rzadko coś z nich pamiętam.
„Trzymam wilka za uszy” czytane w poprzedni weekend, fabularnie w większości juz wyparowało z głowy - i to nie jest to zarzut bo to po prostu moja specyfika. Ale mimo mojej krótkiej pamięci, w głowie zostały mi dwa ostatnie teksty. „Twoja druga żona” o freelancerce żałobnej, która dla swoich dopiero co owdowiałych klientów, odgrywa ich zmarłe żony. Drugie opowiadanie to to tytułowe, o siostrach, które właściwie nie wiem dlaczego zostało przeze mnie zapamiętane.
Opisując całościowo ten tom to były to hipnotyzujące (jak jego okładka) miniatury o kobietach. Kobietach żyjących wśród mizoginii, kobietach zmęczonych, porzuconych, zrezygnowanych i zagubionych. Historie czasami mroczne, oniryczne, niektóre na granicy realizmu (uwielbiam!), ale z tej otoczki nierealności idealnie wybija się realność emocji. Polecam więc dla wielbicielek/li krótkich form.
3.75
„Trzymam wilka za uszy” czytane w poprzedni weekend, fabularnie w większości juz wyparowało z głowy - i to nie jest to zarzut bo to po prostu moja specyfika. Ale mimo mojej krótkiej pamięci, w głowie zostały mi dwa ostatnie teksty. „Twoja druga żona” o freelancerce żałobnej, która dla swoich dopiero co owdowiałych klientów, odgrywa ich zmarłe żony. Drugie opowiadanie to to tytułowe, o siostrach, które właściwie nie wiem dlaczego zostało przeze mnie zapamiętane.
Opisując całościowo ten tom to były to hipnotyzujące (jak jego okładka) miniatury o kobietach. Kobietach żyjących wśród mizoginii, kobietach zmęczonych, porzuconych, zrezygnowanych i zagubionych. Historie czasami mroczne, oniryczne, niektóre na granicy realizmu (uwielbiam!), ale z tej otoczki nierealności idealnie wybija się realność emocji. Polecam więc dla wielbicielek/li krótkich form.
3.75
February 1, 2020
Auribus Teneo Lumpum, the latin phrase meaning I hold a wolf by the ears, an old mythological term with a meaning along the lines of, there is no easy way out
.
Once you begin Laura Van Den Berg’s short story collection the same rings true, there simply is no easy way out of these tales. Overflowing with the strange and bizarre, the eerie and chilling, and quite often unsettling stories of lonely women on the edge, or recounting stories that have shaped or ruined them. Every woman is almost ghostlike, floating between reality and a waking dream, this is a collection that will leave you feeling vulnerable and “linger in your mouth like rotten, fragrant fruit”
.
A woman writes about her last night she spent in a woman’s facility for attempted suicide during her adolescence. A lonely woman spends all her time taking eerie photos of others as she’s unable to feel the weight of her own loss. A man gives his wife a La Croix like drink whenever she’s mad or upset and it magically puts her to sleep, but with intense side effects. A woman grapples with a family secret her husband has kept from her that her father in law reveals to her on his death bed ( this one bordered on creepy as shit) A woman stumbles upon her ex sister in law in Mexico and learns dark things about her brother. And in my favorite story “your second wife” a woman starts a business where she impersonates the dead wives of men for money, sparing no detail, using fake adhesives and changing her looks to match the widowers former lovers but with one client it takes a shocking turn. And lastly there is one story that once it ends, you are left questioning if it was real at all or just a giant figment of the character and our imaginations
.
Tangled with tangible madness and draped in a vale of insanity this is another amazing short story collection written by a wonderful woman, about women, but in a way that everyone can’t help but feel a dreaded sense of relatability to the characters within them.
.
Once you begin Laura Van Den Berg’s short story collection the same rings true, there simply is no easy way out of these tales. Overflowing with the strange and bizarre, the eerie and chilling, and quite often unsettling stories of lonely women on the edge, or recounting stories that have shaped or ruined them. Every woman is almost ghostlike, floating between reality and a waking dream, this is a collection that will leave you feeling vulnerable and “linger in your mouth like rotten, fragrant fruit”
.
A woman writes about her last night she spent in a woman’s facility for attempted suicide during her adolescence. A lonely woman spends all her time taking eerie photos of others as she’s unable to feel the weight of her own loss. A man gives his wife a La Croix like drink whenever she’s mad or upset and it magically puts her to sleep, but with intense side effects. A woman grapples with a family secret her husband has kept from her that her father in law reveals to her on his death bed ( this one bordered on creepy as shit) A woman stumbles upon her ex sister in law in Mexico and learns dark things about her brother. And in my favorite story “your second wife” a woman starts a business where she impersonates the dead wives of men for money, sparing no detail, using fake adhesives and changing her looks to match the widowers former lovers but with one client it takes a shocking turn. And lastly there is one story that once it ends, you are left questioning if it was real at all or just a giant figment of the character and our imaginations
.
Tangled with tangible madness and draped in a vale of insanity this is another amazing short story collection written by a wonderful woman, about women, but in a way that everyone can’t help but feel a dreaded sense of relatability to the characters within them.
January 1, 2022
In these stories, the author focuses on mood and atmosphere. The chilling psychological elements are delivered in an unsettlingly even tone. The creepy unresolved endings are reminiscent of Samanta Schweblin. The gothic atmospherics, and wry knowing darkness of the characters channel Lauren Groff. However, though these stories are about women on the edge, there's a muted quality which blurs the sharpness of those edges. The reader rarely feels the full effects of the gathering dangers. Only the story "Friends" seemed to stretch willingly into the terror potential of vulnerability.
July 31, 2021
a moving, haunting, powerful collection of short stories. i liked best the disorganized nature of each story - they are rarely told chronologically, and take time to sink in - which adds greatly to the air of unease this collection conjures. i don't think i've read anything that made me feel quite like this level of haunted!!
May 20, 2024
That was boring as shit
July 15, 2020
The narration felt really disconnected in every story. For a few of them I thought that it worked well, but for the most part I didn't like it. A lot of the stories felt pointless to me, maybe because they were too short to really get the point across or that the way the author chose to go about them just wasn't for me.
September 1, 2020
I know this writer gets great reviews but this is the third book I have tried. Just can't get her style or content although that said I liked the title story of this book! Young girls in institution get out and visit the railroad tracks
Displaying 1 - 30 of 480 reviews