Search results for ""Author Laura Van Den Berg""

[Laura van den Berg is] a master of the short story form. Hers are deliciously unnerving, moving, and monstrous tales. Karen Russell, author of Orange World and other storiesA smart, fun, noir-y treasure map . . . Van den Berg somehow packs a duffel bag of plot into carry-on-size stories. She also has the right kind of range: from brutal to moving to funny, South America to Paris to Antarctica, really great to freaking outstanding. Kathryn Schulz, New YorkThe surreal, compulsively readable collection that established Laura van den Berg as a singular stylist, reissued for its tenth anniversary. The Isle of Youth, Laura van den Berg's breakout second story collection, explores the lives of women who are mired in secrecy and deception. Ranging from the inscrutability of a marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, these s

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In Laura van den Berg’s surreal, mystifying, and deeply felt second novel, Clare, recently widowed, arrives in Havana, Cuba, to attend the 36th annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, which her horror-loving film-professor husband, Richard, had purchased tickets for. The day after the screening of the movie Richard wanted most to see, Clare finds him standing outside the Museum of the Revolution. He’s wearing a white linen suit she’s never seen before, and he’s supposed to be dead. Meticulously constructed and brimming with layered, poetic imagery, The Third Hotel follows Clare through her time in Havana as the distinction between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred. In van den Berg’s Havana, animals escape from zoos and trains fly off the tracks while Clare follows her once-dead husband and charts her less-than-perfect marriage. As her search for clarity becomes increasingly opaque, the reader is forced to consider not only what is real and what is not, but what truths are lingering behind Clare’s own involvement in her husband’s disappearance and reemergence. Filled with subtle but striking meditations on grief, marriage, art, misogyny, and the loneliness of travel, The Third Hotel is a singular, propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel from an inventive author at the height of her narrative powers.

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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.

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Named a Most Anticipated Book by TIME, Oprah Daily, Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Marie Claire, ELLE, Bustle, and Lit Hub. An Apple Best Book of July.A brilliant ghost story and a profoundly moving and atmospheric meditation on place, memory, and the very nature of reality, where everything is truly not as it seems. Mona Awad, author of RougeAt once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida''s psychogeography and a creepy story about ghosts, missing people, cults, and technology. Don''t miss it. Gabino Iglesias, NPRA heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida's underbelly from the celebrated Laura van den BergIt's another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowi

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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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