RaveThe Southern Review of Bookshe katabatic short stories in Laura van den Berg’s new collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, are haloed by a certain hypnotic aura. With a perfect ten for technique, the primarily first-person narration — with an occasional close third — maintains a constant narrative distance, a not-quite-intimacy you might feel watching, say, Cleo from 5 to 7. Though the stories are not linked, they belong to the same universe, in the way of comic superhero stories. And the world van den Berg has built is one of ghosts, of absurdity, of life at the edge of horror ... van den Berg’s collection is a rejection of the absurd. It is a conscious meditation on meaning-making, on the ways women, faced with the obliterating violence of patriarchy, assert agency, tell their own stories. Van den Berg shows a world in which women, though they may at any moment be shot, kidnapped, drugged, or driven to suicide, persist nevertheless.
