Cover Image: I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

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Member Reviews

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.

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Laura Van Den Berg completely stood up to my expectations in this collection of short stories. The tone of the book is very interestingly convenient, insistent and sarcastic (which ofcourse the title says out loud)

There’s something about the short stories that will want you to keep reading more, they are more like a glimpse in a moment of a complete history. My favourites from the book were ‘Friends’ and ‘Karolina’

Overall the book is definitely worth buying

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When I read Laura van den Berg's debut novel, The Third Hotel, the first thing I thought after finishing was that I wish she would write a book of short stories, because I could just tell it would be excellent if she did. Turns out, I was right! I Hold a Wolf by the Ears was phenomenal. These stories are unsettling, atmospheric, and quietly powerful. van den Berg exerts careful control over her words that lets latent violence creep into many of these stories; it leaves the reader with a magical, eerie feeling that you cannot quite pinpoint. I felt like van den Berg was leading me down a dark road at midnight, but at no point did I ever want to stop. You'll be completely engrossed with this one, I finished it in a day. I'll read whatever van den Berg writes next.

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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.

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In I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, van den Berg approaches the line between the mundane and the surreal but never really crosses it. She just sort of hovers nearby, flirting with it timidly. Nothing really happens in these stories; really, they're stories of anti-happenings, which was disappointing. They are stories of suggestion with no follow through to the actualities of said suggestions. I suppose it was meant to be artistically literary, but I just found this collection to be a bit of a bore and not ready to say anything of resonance.

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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.

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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. 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

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Engrossing, chilling and subtle, this collection of short stories will draw readers who enjoy reading about characters stuck in their own heads, wandering aimlessly, and hyper-focused on a single moment. At times absurd and humorous, at times eerie and speculative the author is a master of the hooking line and creating an entire world within few pages. I would highly recommend this book to those who enjoyed stories by Lidia Yuknavitch, Carmen Maria Machado, or Etgar Keret.

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Really enjoyed all these stories. It's rare to find a short story collection where you actually enjoy every single story, but this one, I did. I will recommend this one in all my book groups. Look forward to more by the author.

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This is a book of short stories, all written in the first person, by women. These women give you a peek into their lives. Each story is about a woman at a pivotal point in their exsistence, whether they are aware of it or not. I had difficulty with this book. I felt like I was dropped in, learned a small bit about each woman and then was yanked out of her life, often without situations being resolved. The reader leaves each story with a sense the stories are unfinished and unsettled.
Thank you to Netgalley for giving me a chance to read an ARC of this book.

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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.

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A collection of sometimes intertwined stories, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is poetic, a book for which slow reading is necessary and worthwhile. Van den Berg's deft writing is for savoring and rereading on the page in order to fully appreciate the craft. The plots, such as they are, are nebulous and unresolved, and the characters equally wispy, their motivations unclear, their specific experiences undetailed to a point of dissatisfaction. But the themes of each piece are powerful and ever-present: violence, homelessness, power; this amalgamation of the concrete and the unsettling is what makes these stories succeed, both individually, and with their occasional linkages.

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I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

Of all the stories I found the title story such a delight with unexpected twists and turns, the language alert and neat. Here’s a great example:

She planned to quit drinking and eating dairy too, but had only managed to stay away from alcohol for two weeks, cheese for a month. She even went to a few meetings for the former and found herself disgusted by all that open, ravenous seeking, by the woman who stood up and spoke about how she believed in the basic goodness of human beings before going on to share that she had been raped while in rehab and that her ex-husband used to beat her with a tire iron.

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Not a fan of van den Berg's novels, but her stories are exquisite. On the surface, they serm spare or even simplistic, but they are far from simplistic. These are stories of women on the fringes of life, grappling to navigate a minefield of life occurrences.
Granted, these stories are not for every reader. But if you're a reader who likes to be left with nuggets of themes to chew on a bit after reading, then Laura van den Berg is for you!
I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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This is the first book I've read by Laura van den Berg, but it definitely won't be my last. I am a fan of short stories. I think it's becoming somewhat of a lost art, which is awful, because short stories have the ability to inspire questions and speculation in a way that longer novels can't, at least in the same way (how many of us were devastated by the Lottery? A good man is hard to find? Who else reread Hills Like White Elephants over and over to try to grasp the subtleties and symbols?). It takes a little more for a reader to read a book of short stories over a novel. They're jerked from story to story, character to character, location to location, in quick succession. This is especially true with I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. The different locations, the variety of situations, the cast of characters all show a wide range for this author, and her writing is also incredibly impressive. I highly recommend this book.

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While I didn’t love her novel, I’ve been a big fan of Laura van den Berg’s short fiction for a couple of years now. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is no exception to this opinion. The stories in this collection are transfixing, and as someone who lived there for a long time and has complicated nostalgic feelings about the region, I appreciated the New England setting/theme throughout the collection. My favorite of the collection, however, takes place in Mexico City - Karolina is the story of a woman who encounters her ex-sister in law living on the streets of Mexico City after a devastating earthquake, a meeting that forced her to question her beliefs about her beloved brother. Other favorites include Last Night and Lizards. The women in van den Berg’s stories are haunted and complicated, with rich inner dialogues and complex feelings. My only wish for this collection was that it was long.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this excellent collection in exchange for this review.

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I was so quickly drawn into this book that I forgot to take notes on what I was reading. Suffice it to say I Hold a Wolf is heartbreaking and brilliant and totally original.

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If you like your short stories weird this book if for you. They are all interesting but must end with no resolution at all.

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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.

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I enjoyed the author’s 2015 novel, Find Me, but was less enchanted by last year’s The Third Hotel. I requested these stories to give her writing another go. Interestingly, I found it a mixed bag with some writings falling into the suspenseful and taut writing akin to Find Me and others with less cohesion like The Third Hotel. I didn’t really enjoy the whole collection or find it overall satisfying, but there were a few gems in the mix.

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