Laura van den Berg
“There's the public self that we present to the outer world. There's the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I'm most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self. It's the secret self, the part of us that we really don't understand, that compels us to do things that we're bewildered or startled by.”
“Like a summer coastal storm, State of Paradise overtook me with its wildness and sorcery. I loved becoming entangled in it. The storytelling here is mind-dilating.”
“The summer’s sweatiest novel . . . The author’s inimitable talents shine in this spiky and sinister Floridian fever dream.”
“Readers who aren’t sure how a science fiction plot will meld with writing that sometimes reads almost like memoir needn’t worry. This is van den Berg, whose Lynchian sensibility and cool yet impassioned eye is somehow the perfect choice to examine what might be America’s most eccentric state and the ways that ‘we are called back to the things we most want to flee’ . . . If speculative autofiction wasn’t a thing, it is now; van den Berg is a pioneer.”
“As enchanting as fairy tales, as mysterious as dreams, these exquisitely composed fictions are as urgent and original as any being written today.”
“I love Laura van den Berg for her eeriness and her elegance, the way the fabric of her stories is woven on a slightly warped loom so that you read her work always a bit perturbed. The Third Hotel is artfully fractured, slim and singular; it’s a book that sings, but always with a strange pressure more felt than heard beneath the song.”
“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. ”
“The most transforming kind of fiction is capable of causing a dislocation of reality: a bit of the bizarre, a lot kept beneath the surface and worlds can open within worlds. There’s Borges and Bolaño, Kafka and Cortázar, Modiano and Murakami, and now Laura van den Berg. The acclaimed author of two story collections and a novel, van den Berg has always been good, but with “The Third Hotel” she’s become fantastic — in every sense of the word…nothing unoriginal slips by in this flawless novel.”
Laura van den Berg’s most recent book is State of Paradise (FSG, 2024), which received starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist, and was named a must-read summer book by TIME, Publishers Weekly, Oprah Daily, and others. She is also the author of the widely praised short story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (FSG, 2020), which NPR called “exquisite.” Other books include the novel The Third Hotel (FSG, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award; the novel Find Me (FSG, 2015); and two other collections of stories, The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009).
Laura’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts &Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bard Fiction Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, and the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, a $25,000 annual prize given to “a young writer of proven excellence in poetry or prose.” She has twice been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Freeman’s, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and One Story, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB Magazine, and Vogue.com.
In a conversation with Tin House, Laura discussed her writing process for The Third Hotel: ”In practical terms, when I’m working on a novel I try and keep up as consistent a practice as possible—working every day ideally, though I take “working” to also mean thinking and making notes and reading connected material (or watching horror films!). I think it is critical to stay in close contact with the project, so I am putting new words down, progressing in that way, and also so that the subconscious stays activated, as the most important material, I find, rises from that more mysterious and submerged realm.”
Laura has taught creative writing in the graduate programs at The Michener Center, Columbia University, and Warren Wilson College. She is currently a Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University.
Born and raised in Florida, Laura lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the writer Paul Yoon, and their dog, Oscar.
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