The characters were a little flat for me. I did keep turning the pages though. I would try something else by the same author because I did enjoy the writing style.

"I Hold a Wolf by the Ears" is a collection of short stories written by Laura van den Berg, published in 2020. The book comprises ten stories that explore themes of loneliness, isolation, loss, and identity.

Each of the stories in this collection is unique and stands on its own. Van den Berg's writing is powerful, and she creates vivid imagery that stays with the reader long after the story ends. The characters in the book are complex and multi-dimensional, and the author delves deep into their psyches, exploring their fears, desires, and motivations.

One of the strengths of this collection is the way in which van den Berg explores the dark and mysterious corners of the human experience. She examines the intricacies of human relationships and the depths of emotion that can drive individuals to make drastic decisions. While many of the stories in this collection are haunting and eerie, there is also a sense of hope and resilience that runs through them.

Overall, "I Hold a Wolf by the Ears" is a beautifully written and thought-provoking collection of stories. Van den Berg's writing is both powerful and evocative, and she explores complex themes with a deft hand. This book will appeal to readers who enjoy literary fiction that is both haunting and hopeful.

The stories were dark, poignant, riveting, and relevant. I had never read anything else by this author, but I will definitely be checking out their work in the future.

This was a bizarre, surreal and immensely enjoyable and compelling collection of short stories. It's my first exposure to this author but I will definitely seek out more from her.

While reading “Your Second Wife,” the second-to-last story in Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, you might immediately think that it’s a criticism of society at large, another argument against late capitalism and its blatant excess thinly-veiled in fiction.

“We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy,” the narrator says. “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.”

She says this while she is tied up in the trunk of a car, kidnapped by one of her clients, people who hire her for a day to dress up as their dead wives and absolve some of their grief. And the words she’s saying are true, sure; we are stripped to the bone by this disgusting capitalism that takes everything from us and gives us nothing. The gig economy allows us to quantify the opportunity cost of living so we choose to work instead.

But what van den Berg does in this story – and in the entire collection – is much smarter than rewording that same schtick about capitalism. The story is about relationships – the one between the narrator and her sister, between the narrator and the husband-clients, the husbands and their dead wives, the narrator and herself.

“Lizards,” a story that can read as an emblem of the #metoo era, is about a husband giving his wife drug-laced LaCroix against the backdrop of the Kavanaugh hearings. This story is one of the few set in third-person, so there’s no implicit protagonist. The husband and the wife are both nameless, which lends a sense of space to the readers. The story is meaningful because it doesn’t take a definitive moral stance on the #metoo movement. It’s not meant to describe the trauma that many women experience regularly, but to be a stirring addendum to someone’s own philosophy on the matter.

All of the stories in this book explore relationships in a strikingly unconventional way. It’s impossible to ignore van den Berg’s attention to the intricacies of sisterhood, in particular, and the way that she sets up these sister relationships. There are multiple examples of this book delving deep into a relationship between two sisters where one of the women is not present at the time of the story.

One sister is usually partnered while the other one, the protagonist, is single. The protagonist takes her missing sister’s place in more than one story. In one, two sisters never meet or know of each other’s existence, the oldest being stillborn years before the youngest is born. It’s a fascinating way to describe the uniquely poisonous kind of competition that can thrive and rot between two women who were born from the same womb.

Van den Berg’s detached writing might strike some as cold. There aren’t many overtly touching moments in any of the stories, and it seems like van den Berg keeps her characters at arms-length, perhaps overcautious against sentimentality. I don’t think she cares about her readers forming an opinion on her characters or the subject matter; she’s not a needy author. But the characters in I Hold a Wolf by the Ears are so odd, their desires so universal, that they endear to us anyway.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears has been described as an “urgent and unsettling collection of women on the verge.” It’s true that this book of short stories centers women, with nearly every story revolving around the lives of its female characters.The writing is beautiful and the stories are some of the most peculiar I’ve ever read.

But the collection isn’t “urgent and unsettling” so much as it is touched with grief and loneliness and weirdness, and even the shortest stories feel well-paced. This isn’t the kind of book that should be described as something that we, as a society, need at this time to poignantly sum up all the universal cultural oddities that we’re experiencing right now. It’s not here to try and heal our collective Trump-induced trauma. But spending time reading something this bizarre and captivating encourages you to see the world in a necessary, fascinating way, and a little healing might be a side effect.

This took me a long time to get through. I would duck into it for a few tales in between other books, and I always came out a little baffled. What did I just read? What exactly did I miss? Laura van den Berg writes so well, she weaves the right words together, and brings the characters through entirely, but still, I often felt like something was missed somewhere along the way. I may reread it, I don't know. It was a miss, for me.

I feel like these stories could have come from any of us - or perhaps all of us. Nevertheless, here are some additional words to meet the character minimum.

Recommended. The stories are a little uneven, not all are equally strong, but the voice is consistently compelling.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.*

A series of darkly themed short stories, I Hold A Wolf by the Ears is an eerie look at the creative mind of Laura van den Berg. Reminiscent of Gillian Flynn's short stories or Edgar Allan Poe, I recommend this series to fans of short stories and dark fiction.

*with thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for this honest review.

Special thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the ARC of these short stories.

I would've given this short story books 4, but I gave it a 3.4, rounded down to 3. Don't get me wrong, these stories weren't all great. It's So very hard to find a short story book with all winners but out of these 11 stories, there were some gems. These stories were about women. Violent women, women on the edge, crazy women and strange strange stories. The ones I loved deserve a 4 rating. There were some 3's and a 2 rating, but the 4 star ratings made up for it!

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.

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.

2,5/5

Liked the writing but none of the stories stayed with me as they were too straight-forward ; all featured people having some issues with their lives and trying to find a solution to them, it felt too surface-level for me and I need depth!

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have to admit that I am not a fan of short stories. And this book is no exception. All of these stories could have been the first pages of a novel that I would definitely be interested in reading, but now I have no closure!!

So why did I pick this book if it clearly states that it is short stories? I was intrigued by the cover and the blurb. I really liked the stories and wished there were more. Some of them are magical and mystical. They border on the edge of reality in that fuzzy part of your mind that appears put together but may not be completely sane. And I love books about women and the madness of real life.

I was initially going to give the book 3 stars but since the only fault I can find is that I wish that the stories were longer, I will give it 4 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advance copy of this book for my reading enjoyment.

Another fine and surreal collection of stories from Laura van den Berg. There's a lot to chew on in these tales, some of which end without any real resolution. The effect, as a whole, is unsettling as we're offered glimpses inside haunted worlds that mirror our own. Excellent, fluid prose.

I’m a big fan of Laura’s work. I really loved the third hotel. This doesn’t disappoint. Every short story is strong and well written, usually a short story collection has one or two meh stories but every story in this is very very very good. I’ve already purchased myself a copy and will literally read anything by Laura Van Den Berg. Thanks FSG!

First, a warning that, if you have a trigger, this collection likely pulls it. Second, a thank you to Farrar, Straus, & Giroux and Netgalley for early access to this one, even though I am reading it very much late.

Florida writers? Are you okay? Lauren Groff’s Florida was a lot of humid weirdness. I swear Laura van den Berg read that one and saw it as a challenge cuz boy is this collection dark and weird and full of that meteorological oppression people in the Southeastern United States know so well.

I really liked this collection of oddities that merges the depressive mundanity of life with the truly off kilter macabre of mild horror and SpecFic. Very Gaiman’s Trigger Warning.

Now this one does that thing authors do in story collections where I’m never sure if I’m too dumb to get it or if it’s just a little messy and overstuffed with ideas because I was left feeling very ???? at the end of several stories. But this also feels like it could be van den Berg’s goal.

This one feels very right for spooky season, just approach with caution

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is the kind of book that you will wake up thinking about at 3 in the morning - a startling line caught in your head. This book reads quick, with each short story taking no time at all to devour - but you shouldn't read them all at once. Each story is like looking at a Norman Rockwell painting but through the looking glass; at first, it all seems ... predicable. A woman struggling with the demands of motherhood, a young woman coming to terms with suicidal ideation. But within a few paragraphs, van den Berg achieves, in each story, to show the reader themselves while blowing them wide open. She knows her readers and each story uncovers a disturbing 'everywoman' moment that will resonate and unsettle readers and is worth drawing out.

I liked the writing a lot but I felt I had to work hard to understand the stories and the order of events in them. I know many who would enjoy these dark stories but it just wasn’t for me.

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.