ONE OF TIME 'S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2020. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, Bustle, Good Housekeeping , the New York Public Library, Library Journal , Lit Hub , Electric Literature, and Tor.com "As enchanting as fairy tales, as mysterious as dreams, these exquisitely composed fictions are as urgent and original as any being written today.” ―Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend , winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction 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 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. One of Entertainment Weekly 's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 and 30 Hottest Summer Reads, one of O, the Oprah Magazine 's 30 Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of BuzzFeed 's Most Anticipated Books of 2020 and 29 Summer Books You Won't Be Able to Put Down, one of Esquire 's 20 Must-Read Books of Summer 2020, one of the BBC's Ten Books to Read in 2020, one of TIME 's 12 New Books to Read in July one of ELLE 's 30 Most Anticipated New Books of Summer 2020, one of Refinery29's 25 Books You'll Want to Read This Summer, one of Time 's 45 New Books You Need to Read This Summer, one of Thrillist 's 21 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2020, one of Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of July 2020, one of LitHub's 2020 Summer Books, and one of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the First Half of 2020 "The terrain of Van den Berg’s difficult, beautiful and urgent new book, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears , is an ecosystem of weird and stirring places you’ll want to revisit, reconsider, maybe even take shelter in . . . Van den Berg feels like the writer we not only want but maybe need right now . . . Van den Berg is so consistently smart and kind, bracingly honest, keen about mental illness and crushing about everything from aging to evil that you might not be deluded in hoping that the usual order of literary fame could be reversed: that an author with respectable acclaim for her novels might earn wider recognition for a sneakily brilliant collection of stories." -- Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times "[A] richness of reading pleasures brims in every one of these 11 tales . . . this book offers the greatest distillation of [van den Berg's] talents to date. To pick a best story is beyond me . . . Eye-popping description, however, is far from the only form of liveliness in these narratives. The recurring drama is that of identity lost, reinvented or both." -- John Domini, The Washington Post "Exquisite. It took a decade of writing book reviews to get here, but here we are ― I've used "exquisite." The stories in Laura van den Berg's I Hold a Wolf by the Ears are exquisite . . . unsettling and bizarre, coming at you from weird angles to hit you in unexpected ways like the well-trained fists of a professional boxer." -- Gabino Iglesias, NPR "A series of melancholy meditations on death, grief and travel . . . All of the work has a dangerous, eerie charge . . . This is one of van den Berg’s strengths: The mundane becomes swiftly, surprisingly, sinister." -- Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis StarTribune "A collection of dreamlike tales of womanhood that speak, however strangely, to the dark realities of modern life." -- Entertainment Weekly "These disquieting, topsy-turvy tales by an ingenious author blur the borders between reality and fantasy to reveal the universal