Laura van den Berg

P former library book has plastic cover on it and stickers clean pages 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Pennsylvania

Stories

One of Entertainment Weekly's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of O, the Oprah Magazine's 30 Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of the BBC's Ten Books to Read in 2020, and one of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the First Half of 2020 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 acclaimed and prizewinning Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and mind like rotten, fragrant fruit. 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 thoughts we reveal to no one but ourselves. In “Lizards,” a man mutes his wife's anxieties by giving her a La Croix–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 violent 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 close. 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.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

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Michigan

An August 2018 IndieNext Selection. Named a Summer 2018 Read by The Washington Post, Vulture, Nylon, Elle, InStyle, Southern Living, Alma, Cliche, and Tor.com In Havana, Cuba, a widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death—and the truth about their marriage—in Laura van den Berg’s surreal, mystifying story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery. Shortly after Clare arrives in Havana, Cuba, to attend the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, she finds her husband, Richard, standing outside a museum. He’s wearing a white linen suit she’s never seen before, and he’s supposed to be dead. Grief-stricken and baffled, Clare tails Richard, a horror film scholar, through the newly tourist-filled streets of Havana, clocking his every move. As the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs, Clare finds grounding in memories of her childhood in Florida and of her marriage to Richard, revealing her role in his death and reappearance along the way. The Third Hotel is a propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel from an inventive author at the height of her narrative powers.

The Third Hotel

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Pet friendly home. Please view all photos. Book has never been read. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Louisiana

A Novel

"A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida's underbelly, from a reality-warping storyteller"--

State of Paradise

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Massachusetts

Joy, a loner who works the graveyard shift at a grocery store, finds herself immune to a strange and fatal virus that is sweeping the United States and sets off across the devastated country in search of her birth mother. By the author of The Isle of Youth.

Find Me (SIGNED - but personalized)

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Long-listed for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize After two acclaimed story collections, Laura van den Berg brings us Find Me, her highly anticipated debut novel--a gripping, imaginative, darkly funny tale of a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. When Joy's immunity gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas, she sees a chance to escape her bleak existence. There she submits to peculiar treatments and follows seemingly arbitrary rules, forming cautious bonds with other patients--including her roommate, whom she turns to in the night for comfort, and twin boys who are digging a secret tunnel. As winter descends, the hospital's fragile order breaks down and Joy breaks free, embarking on a journey from Kansas to Florida, where she believes she can find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a child. On the road in a devastated America, she encounters mysterious companions, cities turned strange, and one very eerie house. As Joy closes in on Florida, she must confront her own damaged memory and the secrets she has been keeping from herself.

Find Me

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

Laura van den Berg's gorgeous new book, The Isle of Youth, explores the lives of women mired in secrecy and deception. From a newlywed caught in an inscrutable marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, the characters in these bewitching stories are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless, and they will do what it takes to survive.

Each tale is spun with elegant urgency, and the reader grows attached to the marginalized young women in these stories--women grappling with the choices they've made and searching for the clues to unlock their inner worlds. This is the work of a fearless writer whose stories feel both magical and mystical, earning her the title of "sorceress" from her readers. Be prepared to fall under her spell.
An NPR Best Book of 2013

The Isle of Youth

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Taunt prose performed on a high wire, fearless stories that reach inside and rattle the soul.

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

Asha Dore

John Henry Fleming

Amy Parker

Jason Ockert

Racquel Henry

John Brandon

Sohrab Homi Fracis

Nathan Deuel

Alissa Nutting

Michael J. Seidlinger

Derrick Austin

Kristen Arnett

Lindsay Hunter

Sarah Gerard

Kevin Moffett

Lidia Yuknavitch

Jeff Parker

Jaquira Díaz

New Stories from a Sinking Peninsula

'As hot and wild and dangerous as our beloved (or is it bedeviled?) state, itself.'' -- Lauren Groff, author of ''Fates & Furies''

We Can't Help It If We're from Florida

Jack Pendarvis

Lisa Taddeo

Alexander Chee

Stephen Dixon

R. O. Kwon

Raven Leilani

Gordon Lish

T. Kira Madden

Fresh off winning the 2019 ASME award for fiction, issue 55 features new fiction from Laura van den Berg, Gordon Lish, T Kira Madden, and Emma Copley Eisenberg, and more; letters about face masks and puttanesca and the rapid disintegration of our natural world by R. O. Kwon, Alexander Chee, and Jack Pendarvis; a searing nonfiction piece by José Orduña that harkens back to shoe-leather journalism, chronicling his experience at immigrant-rights demonstrations across the spectrum of activism; oh, and a 16-page section of mesmerizing photography by Pelle Cass from his series "Crowded Fields." Read and be renewed!

McSweeney's Issue 55 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

Jaime Clarke

Jonathan Lethem

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

New York

A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY SELECTION All novels are necessarily concerned with their protagonists, but what of the minor characters that fill out a novel's landscape? We can never know them as well as we should or like. The same is true for the trilogy of novels by Jaime Clarke: Vernon Downs, World Gone Water, and Garden Lakes. MINOR CHARACTERS brings together Clarke's previously published short stories featuring the supporting characters in his trilogy, as well as stories by some of today's most talented contemporary writers, who have chosen characters from the trilogy and contributed a story. With a Foreword by Jonathan Lethem, and an Introduction by Laura van den berg, this Warholian enterprise has produced a unique and stirring collection that both stands on its own and enriches the standalone novels in Clarke's trilogy. Featuring original stories by Mona Awad, Christopher Boucher, Kenneth Calhoun, Nina de Gramont, Ben Greenman, Annie Hartnett, Owen King, Neil LaBute, J. Robert Lennon, Lauren Mechling, Shelly Oria, Stacey Richter, Joseph Salvatore, Andrea Seigel, and Daniel Torday. "Clarke has done more, even, than Vonnegut in setting his characters free: he's flipped foreground and background, and at the same time invited others in to browse, and revise, and interfere with, and extend, his fictional who's who."--Jonathan Lethem, from his foreword

Minor Characters

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Laura van den Berg

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

Laura van den Berg

The Third Hotel

Laura van den Berg

State of Paradise

Laura van den Berg

Find Me

Laura van den Berg

The Isle of Youth

Laura van den Berg

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

Asha Dore

We Can't Help It If We're from Florida

Jack Pendarvis

McSweeney's Issue 55 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

Jaime Clarke

Minor Characters