Laura van den Berg is returning to the short-story collection.
Not that readers were complaining.
Van den Berg has shared an exclusive preview of her new book with EW.
Credit: Paul Yoon; FSG
I Hold the Wolf by the Earspublishes June 9, 2020, and isavailable for pre-order.
I was eighteen and flunking out of college.
I felt utterly lost.
FSG
I enrolled in a fiction workshop hoping for an easy A.
You read some made-up stuff, you make some stuff up.
In an instant, the dread lifted.
I had anticipated lethal boredom and ended up feeling as though I had received a divination.
Nevertheless, I was in love.
It felt like coming home, then, to return to the short form after writing two novels.
A night photographer discovers some unearthly footage on her camera.
What does this life beyond have to say about our world that cannot be conveyed through other channels?
What does it mean to haunt?
What does it mean to be haunted?
In her essay The Ghost Story Persists in American Literature.
Parul Sehgal writes that ghost stories are never just reflections.
They are social critiques camouflaged with cobwebs; the past clamoring for redress.
How to live alongside consequences that cannot be undone?
Here ghosts appear in a forest in North Florida and in a train car bound for a mysterious destination.
To this day, I cant imagine an artistic trajectory for myself without the short story in it.
Words were exchanged, though I wont share them here.
Was that experience a product of my grief-soaked imagination or owed to some other ineffable force?
Laura van den Berg
Related content:
