This online program will be streamed live via Zoom.

“van den Berg’s fantastically surreal ode to American culture in chaos, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, might stand as the benchmark short-story collection of our new decade.”~ Interview Magazine

Laura van den Berg joins Heidi Pitlor for True Conversations, where Pitlor asks leading contemporary writers questions not typically asked to women writers. This is not your average book talk!

van den Berg ‘s most recent collection of storied 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.

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Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her next collection of stories, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, will be published by FSG in July. Born and raised in Florida, Laura splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida, with her husband and dog.

Heidi Pitlor is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage, which was optioned for film. Her third novel, Impersonation, will come out on August 18, 2020. A former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, she has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is also the editorial director of the literary studio, Plympton. Her writing has been published in Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, and elsewhere. She lives outside Boston.

The Mount is a Massachusetts Cultural Council UP designated organization welcoming participants of all disabilities. Please contact The Mount at 413-551-5100 or by email, info@edithwharton.org, to discuss accommodations needed to participate fully in this event.