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• State of Paradise Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2024

1. State of paradise : a novel LCCN 2023057436 Type of material Book Personal name Van den Berg, Laura, author. Main title State of paradise : a novel / Laura van den Berg. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. Projected pub date 2407 Description pages cm ISBN 9780374612207 (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

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  Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her M.F.A. at Emerson College. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her stories have appeared in Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize XXIV. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Sewanee Writers Conferences, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

  Genres: Literary Fiction

  New and upcoming books
  July 2024

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  State of Paradise

  Novels
  Find Me (2015)
  The Third Hotel (2018)
  State of Paradise (2024)
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  Collections
  What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (2009)
  The Isle of Youth (2013)
  There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights (2017)
  I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (2020)

• Department of English, Harvard University website - https://english.fas.harvard.edu/people/laura-van-den-berg

  HOME / PEOPLE /
  Laura van den Berg
  Senior Lecturer
  vandenberg
  Education: B.A., Rollins College (2005)
  M.F.A., Emerson College (2008)

  Interests: Fiction Writing

  Selected Works: State of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024); I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020); The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018); (Find Me) Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015); The Isle of Youth: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013)

  Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bard Fiction Prize, an O. Henry Award, and has twice been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her next novel, State of Paradise, will be published by FSG in 2024.

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  Office: Lamont Library 409
  laura_vandenberg@fas.harvard.edu
  p: 617-495-2098
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• Laura van den Berg website - https://lauravandenberg.com

  ABOUT LAURA
  Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), which was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her next two novels, State of Paradise and Ring of Night, are forthcoming from FSG in 2024 and 2026.

  Photo credit is © Lucy Bohnsack 2023

  She is the author of two previous story collections, The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), and the novel Find Me (FSG, 2015).

  Laura’s other honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, 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.

  Laura’s stories have appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Freeman’s, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, 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, and Vogue.com.

  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. Laura lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the writer Paul Yoon, and their dog, Oscar.

  AWARDS
  In 2022, Laura van den Berg was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for her novel-in-progress Florida Diary.

  In 2021, Laura won a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

  Her first story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, as was her second story collection, The Isle of Youth. That second collection also received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, given for “a work of fiction published during the preceding year that is a considerable literary achievement.” Stories from The Isle of Youth—“Opa-Locka” and “Antarctica”—appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Mystery Stories. In 2015, Laura was awarded The Bard Fiction Prize. Her debut novel, Find Me, was longlisted for The Dylan Thomas Prize. Laura worked on her second novel, The Third Hotel, with the support of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. The Third Hotel was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and was named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets. Her most recent collection of stories, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, was supported by a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship. The collection was longlisted for The Joyce Carol Oates Prize and was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020.

• Poets & Writers - https://www.pw.org/content/sideways_ghost_stories_a_qa_with_laura_van_den_berg

  Sideways Ghost Stories: A Q&A With Laura van den Berg
  by Brian Gresko
  ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
  7.27.20
  Printable Version

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  Ifirst encountered Laura van den Berg’s work at a reading, and her words entranced me. The piece she read, an excerpt from her debut novel, Find Me (FSG, 2015), compelled me viscerally yet felt eerily dream-like; it raised the hair on the back of my neck. Surely, I thought, this must be the result of her commanding stage presence. But no. On the page, van den Berg’s voice is just as striking and magical.

  Laura van den Berg’s latest book, the story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  In her new collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, van den Berg returns to the short story after her acclaimed sophomore novel, The Third Hotel (FSG, 2018). In an essay that accompanied the galley, she writes that short stories saved her life, providing her new passion and hope when she first encountered one at the age of eighteen, on the verge of flunking out of college. At the time, she knew so little about literature that she called the stories “tiny novels.” In the case of her work, the term is apt. Each of the eleven pieces in Wolf is as sharp as a fang, but the stories’ shadowy margins hint at a wide—and wilder—world beyond their borders. In “Lizards,” a woman enraged by the politics of the day finds comfort in a generic brand of seltzer her husband supplies her, a drink that anesthetizes her, and that she comes to appreciate because being asleep is preferable to being angry. In “Hill of Hell,” a woman who has a stillborn baby finds herself replaying a similar scene years later, when she has another daughter who dies of a tumor. The women in these stories live in a cruel world, and throughout there is a sense of something otherworldly—ghosts, or if not ghosts, strange, unseen forces—at play.

  Over e-mail, I had the pleasure of talking with van den Berg about her collection. As we did, a strange mirroring happened. Unseen forces took shape as the pandemic put our world on hold. We found ourselves in a weird, fraught limbo where the line between life and death is tenuous—a fitting feeling, it seemed, for discussing her uncanny work.

  Of putting together this collection, you write: “When I sense that I might be working my way toward a collection, I am mindful of where the stories begin to overlap, to speak to one another, and before long I could discern a recurring thread: All these stories were ghost stories, in one way or another.” Can you unpack this for me? I’m curious about the act of composing the collection as a whole, and what decisions were involved.
  The composition of Wolf was a little unusual in that, at one point, I had maybe seventeen or eighteen stories that were “candidates” for a collection. Yet I understood that these stories did not all belong in the same book. But what was the book? I had to spend a lot of time thinking through that question. And then, in the summer of 2018, I spent nearly six weeks at a residency and wrote four new stories: “Hill of Hell,” “Cult of Mary,” “Karolina,” and “Your Second Wife.” The addition of these four was hugely clarifying, in that I could now identify the stories that wanted to be in conversation with one another, could see the recurring thread of the “sideways ghost story.” I pulled my six favorite haunted stories out of the big preexisting stack. Then I had ten. After working on the order for a while, I sensed that a beat was missing and wrote “Lizards,” the most overtly topical of the stories, last.

  I love that phrase, “sideways ghost story.” What do you mean by that?
  I’m thinking about ghost stories that are a bit unconventional, or/also that are coming at the haunted from an unexpected angle. In some stories in Wolf, the hauntedness is literal, as in: ghosts! In other stories, the haunting is more a state of being, both in the self and in the surrounding world.

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  “Lizards” stands out in how topical it is: It’s set during what seems to be Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate hearing, although he goes unnamed. How has your work changed over time in regard to its engagement with politics? And why did you think the collection needed a story that contained a reference to this administration?
  Parul Sehgal has a great essay called “The Ghost Story Persists in American Literature. Why?” There she describes ghosts as “social critiques camouflaged with cobwebs.” I was thinking a lot about the supernatural as a conduit for exploring the ways in which the worlds of these women are designed to cause erasure and harm. I’m equally interested in the supernatural as a conduit for exploring how some of these women also cause erasure and harm, especially in the wake of the 2016 election and given the role white women played in it. This perhaps comes out the most in “Karolina,” but it’s present in “Lizards,” too, I think. On the one hand, the wife is furious over Kavanaugh. On the other, what is she willing to do to challenge the structures that make someone like Kavanaugh possible?

  As a younger writer, I was raised with the idea that art should not be too explicit with its politics, lest we become blunt or polemical. We weren’t told to be apolitical exactly, but subtlety was prized. I will always deeply believe that fiction is most powerful when we are writing in the direction of the unknowable and when forgone conclusions are being disrupted, but I no longer believe that project to be at odds with also having a political vision for one’s work.

  In those two stories, “Lizards” and “Karolina,” the political dimension is most explicit, but male violence—whether physical, like in “Volcano House,” in which the protagonist’s sister has been killed at a mass shooting by a young white man, or psychological, like in “Cult of Mary,” with its aggressively overbearing older white male tourist—is a specter plaguing many of the protagonists in Wolf. I found it powerful to consider the way the house that we all live in, this country, is haunted by the violence of white men.
  Yes, it is. That’s not a new reality, but it is one that was weighing heavy as I worked on Wolf. My ambition was not to render that dynamic in a simplistic way—villain vs. victim—but rather to explore the various kinds of power structures at work in the daily lives of these characters (and their varying degrees of complicity with them). “Your Second Wife,” for example, concerns a gig worker who has devised a gig that allows her to do relatively well in this economy and also makes her extremely vulnerable to harm.

  This brings to mind the title story, in which the protagonist is both a victim of male violence — she’s slapped in the face by a man who runs around town slapping women at random — and at one point she herself slaps a man in the face, a man whom she then allows to help her. It’s complicated, so much so that by the end of the story she is no longer sure who exactly she is. Why did you choose that story as the title of the collection?
  Well, the original title was “Aftermath,” but that story got cut. Then I wasn’t sure what the title should be. My friend Lauren Groff was an early reader and she is really gifted at structure. I’d asked for her input on the order, and she replied with a complete re-imagining of the order I had given her. I was so grateful. Her argument for putting “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears” last was that the story has the most of the other stories’ elements in it, so it brings about a kind of thematic culmination (I’m paraphrasing). In thinking about this more, I also like that the story ended on a moment of expanse, of mystery and wonder and opening up. Thinking about the order, in turn, clarified why that story was destined to be the title story.

  Was there a typical way in which these stories came to you, or that you found your way into them? Formally, they are very different from one another. You mentioned “Hill of Hell,” for instance. It opens with a relatively contained scene of two old friends talking on a train, and then, in the course of pages, years pass, then a whole lifetime. I was so taken by the sweep of this story.
  I had such a hard time with my first few drafts of “Hill of Hell” because I was trying to make the whole story happen on the train. And the whole story did not want to happen on the train. Then I was reading Yiyun Li’s “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,” and Denis Johnson’s “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” and was reminded that time need not be linear and compact in stories. It can be vast, broken, and capacious in unusual and surprising ways. Not a new concept, but one that I needed to be reminded of at that particular moment and one that allowed me to write the story. So sometimes I have an idea or approach that’s a bit right-headed and a bit wrong-headed and I find my way through reading. Sometimes it’s the frequency of a certain voice [that leads me], or I get very interested in a situation or a concept. The portals appear in many different ways, I find.

  A hotel is of course central to The Third Hotel and here hotels appear in “Volcano House” and in the title story. They bring to mind the similar backdrops in Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, or the work of Stefan Zweig, or John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire—a whole class could be built around literature set in hotels. Why have you returned to that setting so often? And what else could be added to the reading list of this imaginary class?
  I would love to teach or take such a class. Maybe I will! I would add Juan Villoro’s The Reef, which takes place at the Pyramid, a resort that specializes in “extreme tourism,” and Joanna Walsh’s Hotel, which chronicles Walsh’s experiences as a hotel reviewer. Hotels contain a great many interesting and bizarre intersections. They bring together groups of people who might never congregate otherwise. These are anonymous. They are intimate. There are layers of access and privilege. Depending on the hotel, it might be designed to be so extensive and labyrinthian that one never has to leave, almost like a stranded cruise ship. I think fiction thrives on contradictions, and hotels tend to be full of them.

  On Literary Hub, in a conversation with Crystal Hana Kim, you said that you were working on some of these stories in tandem with The Third Hotel. This isn’t surprising, given that The Third Hotel begins when the protagonist, Clare, sees her recently deceased husband while traveling in Cuba—another ghost. I’m curious how this worked, process-wise. Did you sometimes put aside the novel to pen stories, or did the stories happen in the margins while waiting for readers to give you feedback on drafts, or during the long road to publication? And what connective tissue do you see between the two books?
  Well, I was at that residency that I had mentioned, after I had finished The Third Hotel but before it was published, so hauntedness was—and is—still very much on my mind. The oldest story I wrote in maybe 2013 or thereabouts, before I started work on the novel, but others were written alongside The Third Hotel. If I’m remembering correctly, I wrote a burst of stories near the end of a very intense phase of revising, as though my imagination was in desperate need of an escape hatch, a chance to dream in different directions, after spending so much time in Clare’s claustrophobic world.

  On Twitter, you shared a syllabus for a class about ghosts stories you were teaching. Are any of these stories in conversation with those?
  Yes, definitely! I think there is a very physical dimension to hauntedness, in that it often has to live somewhere tangible. “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortázar and some of Mariana Enriquez’s stories, like “Adela’s House” and “The Dirty Kid,” got me thinking about movement through physical space as a passage from one dimension to another. I also am interested in hauntings of a more ambiguous sort, like the kind in Helen Oyeyemi’s story “Presence” or in Joy Williams’s “The Country.” In my “haunted” class, we read Freud’s “The Uncanny” and spent time with the idea that the uncanny is connected to matter that is supposed to be kept secret being inadvertently revealed—and how that can be a powerful energy source for a work of fiction.

  I love that “uncanny” element in your work so much, Laura, and would love to be a fly on the wall in that class. How did you learn how to channel that energy source in your work? What advice do you have for a writer who wants to do something similar?
  In that class, we talked about how, when it comes to the supernatural, the more important question is not “What is it?” but “Why is it?” Not with the idea that the why should receive a definite answer, but rather thinking about how the latter question can be a powerful generator of urgency and surprise and meaning.

  For me, the most powerful hauntings in literature are deeply rooted in histories both macro and micro. What are the supernatural elements here to show us? What questions are they here to ask? What directions are they encouraging us to look in? What histories do they want us to consider? That said, I don’t think about any of these questions when I’m just starting out; these are all post–first draft considerations. Steven Millhauser describes stories as “visions,” and for me those early drafts are very much about transcribing the initial vision. Everything follows from there.

  I feel like I would be remiss not to mention the backdrop against which we’re having this conversation. What has this time of pandemic and quarantine been like for you as a writer, both professionally and also creatively? Politically, if you allow yourself to dream, what do you hope might change after this crisis?
  I feel like there is very little perspective right now. Or at least I have very little perspective to offer. For writers, people compelled to make stories, it can be tempting to approach catastrophe as an occasion for narrative. In many ways, this is a very natural and human impulse. A narrative can lend an experience a comprehensible shape. A narrative can help us find meaning. Yet there is nothing intrinsically meaningful about what’s happening. A virus is not a metaphor, or inherently instructive. This period of time does not have to be an occasion for insight, let alone wisdom. So more than anything I’ve been trying to just remain alert to the bewildering present tense, which is evolving in frightening ways day by day.

  Publishing is now facing unprecedented challenges. Apart from cancelled tours, it’s uncertain how much longer houses will be able to print and distribute finished copies of books. Of course, everyone—agents, editors, writers—are doing their level best to innovate, with much nimbleness and creativity, but I don’t think anyone really knows what the future holds. Everything, from the fate of certain industries to the health of one’s immediate community, is tenuous right now. One thing that is certain: I am grateful every day for the wonderful team I work with. This is a strange and unsettling road, even for someone who has published four books, but I have some incredible traveling companions.

  Strangely I have been able to write—at least for now. I think it might be because I’m working on a project set in the world of women’s amateur boxing and I miss my own gym terribly, so sheer longing has been calling me to the desk. Also, the boxing world can be a hermetic one in certain ways, which is maybe why it’s a space that feels possible to access on the page.

  I hope the pandemic shatters any lingering illusions about this country’s relationship to equality and justice. We were ill-prepared for a catastrophe of this magnitude, and the longer it unfolds the more the inequity that is deep in the marrow of our systems is revealed. My political dream would be to elect leaders who are committed to creating a better reality for all, as opposed to just doing triage on the one we have.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/coming-at-ghosts-from-unexpected-angles-an-interview-with-laura-van-den-berg-on-i-hold-a-wolf-by-the-ears/

  “Coming at Ghosts from Unexpected Angles”: An Interview with Laura van den Berg on “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears”
  By Elliot SchiffDecember 3, 2020
  “Coming at Ghosts from Unexpected Angles”: An Interview with Laura van den Berg on “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears”
  IN ONE OF the earlier sessions of Laura van den Berg’s Introduction to Short Fiction class, she walked to the chalkboard and drew crested ocean waves and a deep, sandy ocean floor far beneath. Toward the water’s surface she wrote the names of simpler elements of a story, things like “plot.” Going deeper the words got more complicated: “time,” “theme,” etc. At the bottom, where, following the pattern, I thought she was going to write some brilliant phrase that perfectly describes the thing that makes a short story a short story, she drew something that looked like a 2-D sketch of the terrifying anglerfish from Finding Nemo. She called it an “alien fish.” By deciding not to name what gives a story its essential itness, van den Berg claimed that there was always something beyond language in a story. You couldn’t quite describe these fish swimming beneath the surface, but you felt them, and each alien fish felt specific. To me, this registered as an act of incredible generosity: calling for an open-minded discovery, rather than a flattening interpretation, of our own work and the work of others. Ever since this class, I can’t think about art without thinking about its alien fish.

  The notion of the alien fish reminds me of one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, David Berman’s “Self-Portrait at 28.” “I am trying to get at something / and I want to talk very plainly to you / so that we are both comforted by the honesty,” Berman writes. To bring some fish to light you need flights of the imagination, stylistic and structural daring. In other cases, as with Berman, you might call for plainspoken language. Either way, per van den Berg’s model, it’s about working to discover the alien fish lurking beneath the ocean surface of your story (or poem or play or film, etc.), and to be truthful to them.

  In her recently published collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, van den Berg practices what she preaches. The collection is a masterclass in form serving content; the form of each story takes on the unique characteristics of the fish swimming underneath, however impossible to put to words. Many stories deal with what van den Berg called in a recent Books Are Magic reading “the presence of absence,” but from shifting vantages; shocking leaps in time, perspective, and tone keep this collection fresh. Funny, poignant, contemplative, and haunting, this collection delights and unsettles in equal measure. I can’t wait to reread it.

  In this conversation held over email, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we talk about van den Berg’s process, what it feels like to publish a book in the midst of a pandemic, and unconventional ghosts.
  ¤

  ELLIOT SCHIFF: You’re pretty far along in your career as a writer, having written two novels and now four short story collections. What did you want to be different about this collection?

  LAURA VAN DEN BERG: I want each book I do to be different from what’s come before — that’s always been important to me. It seems boring to just write the same thing over and over again. I knew I didn’t want to put out a collection that just read like the B-side of The Isle of Youth. In terms of the individual stories, I wanted to write stories that were more compact and that cut through time in surprising ways. At a certain point, maybe in early 2018, I had a lot of stories — 300 or 350 pages’ worth. It took a while to figure out the book: the thematic through lines, the larger conversation I wanted the collection to have.

  I’m glad you mentioned thematic through lines, because one of the most exciting things about reading Wolf was picking up on a theme, feeling like I had a handle on how it was working in the book, and then reading the next story — which would take whatever expectations I had and subvert them totally.

  I felt this subversion most often with the collection’s representation of storytelling and truth. The relationship between displays of intense feeling, characters’ inner lives, what “happened,” and what characters choose to tell each other is unsteady and shifting in Wolf. I got the sense that if the collection has a truth claim, it’s the lack of a stable, centralized truth. What about the relationship between storytelling and truth did you hope to explore in this collection?

  I come from a big family, so I’ve always been aware that a person’s perceptions are usually a collision between some kind of loose, objective truth — that is, we can all agree it’s raining outside — and our highly subjective inner worlds, that can illuminate and skew in equal measure. In “Cult of Mary,” the man’s revelation [that his wife is not really dead, she just left him] is not intended to make him more sympathetic — for what it’s worth I actually never think of characters this way, as “sympathetic” or “unsympathetic” — but just to complicate his presence. He is in a place of pain that’s real and he’s manipulating his pain to provide cover for toxic, misogynistic behavior; both things can be true at the same time. Also, many of the characters in these stories misperceive things in their worlds — like the narrator in “Slumberland” — or perceive the necessary thing a bit too late. I think the instability you’re speaking to rises from those acts of misperception as well.

  So, yes, I do tend to think our inner realities are always shifting and that fluidity shows up in the character. As perhaps a kind of counterpoint or counter-consideration, I also felt it was important to not have ambiguity around some of the national events that are referenced. In “Lizards,” for example, the premise in some ways is to access “both sides,” given that story is told from both the husband’s and the wife’s point of view, but I think it’s pretty clear that the story itself doesn’t regard the husband’s perspective to be tenable.

  I loved “Lizards” for what felt to me like a subtle takedown of the open-debate fantasy of “both sides,” satirizing that fantasy’s often true aim: to give a reprehensible point of view unfair due. As you said, if it hadn't been clear that the story treats the wife’s perspective as the truth, it wouldn’t have had the same effect. To me, the story responded to national events — the Kavanaugh hearings — in a way that only fiction could. When in the collection did you know you wanted one particular truth to shine through, as in “Lizards”?

  I think about dimension a lot in fiction, and I’m always attempting to write into multidimensional experiences — which, in turn, often contain multiple, sometimes contradictory truths. I once heard Garth Greenwell, on a panel, say that he was only interested in fiction that disrupted foregone conclusions (I might be a little off on the wording, but that was the gist). That idea really resonates with me. If my own foregone conclusions aren’t disrupted at some point, then why write the story?

  For “Lizards” specifically, I did indeed intend for the story, through the structure of the opening conversation between the husband and wife, to speak to the destructive fantasy of the “both sides” debate. I won’t say exactly what happens midway through … but a new trapdoor opens in the world and the story drops down into another kind of reality. As much as I find the husband’s views (and actions) reprehensible, I didn’t want the story to be flattened into a reductive, one-dimensional victim-abuser scenario. What the husband is doing to his wife is monstrous, and, on the other hand, there is a part of her that longs for the obliteration, the permission to look away. She is caught between a rage that is intense, yet also somewhat superficial, and this longing to just turn the world off. What would she be willing to change in her life, to give up, in order to help dismantle the structures that make someone like Kavanaugh possible? I’m not sure — and I don’t think she is, either. So she is a victim within her marriage and also complicit in the larger political reality.

  It makes a lot of sense for me to be asking you this question, as your former student: the first story, “Last Night,” among other things, dramatizes teaching fiction writing. What interested you about fictionalizing the experience, or your experience, of being a creative writing professor? Also, earlier you mentioned the conversation you wanted the collection to have. Could you tell me more about that?

  “Last Night” is written in more of an “autofiction” mode — which is to say it’s by far the most autobiographical story in the book, though there is some made-up stuff mixed in — so the tangential mentions of the narrator being a writer/a creative writing professor were just a natural extension of that voice (as opposed to my wanting to write into the experience of teaching specifically). Originally, I had that story last. I had been thinking about order very literally, as in: maybe the story titled “Last Night” should be … last. Then a very smart writer friend read the collection and reimagined the order for me, which was a huge act of generosity. She argued for putting “Last Night” first, with the idea that the collection should start with the immediacy of the very personal and then telescope out from there — kind of like dropping a stone into a lake, the way the initial plunge is followed by a series of expanding rings.

  “Last Night” also seemed like a good opener for the larger conversation you were asking about. It was a story I’d tried to write many times before, though always with a lot more fiction, and I found, in the end, a certain bluntness in the voice was what was needed. So telling stories that are difficult to tell; coming at ghosts from unexpected angles, in this case being haunted by the survival-based choices we might make at certain points in our lives … these are dimensions of experience that “Last Night” deals with very directly and that appear, in different contexts, throughout the collection.

  Could you tell me about your feelings toward the ghost story? I also know you taught a writing workshop on writing the supernatural this past fall. Did you learn anything about your relationship with the ghost story in the course of teaching this class?

  By the time I taught the class — in fall 2019 — Wolf was finished, but I think my work on the collection (and also the book that came before, a novel called The Third Hotel) definitely helped shape the class. I had been thinking about the supernatural as a means to explore the material that cannot be contained by corporeal life: the unsayable secrets, the unexamined truths, the incomprehensible realities. In an NPR interview, Toni Morrison once said: “I think of ghosts and haunting as just being alert. If you are really alert, you see the life that exists beyond the life that’s on top.” 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? We applied these questions to a really wide range of work, from Edith Wharton to Mariana Enríquez to Helen Oyeyemi. I think the ghost story is so enduring in part because it is so flexible and so varied.

  These are such interesting questions to ask … Based on what you’re saying, and the wonderful Morrison quote, are you saying that supernatural elements allow you to bring those alien fish closer to the surface?

  I think that any work of fiction needs multiple ways to communicate. What is going on in this story that can’t be bound by language? That’s an important question for me to ask and is related to the “alien fish” idea — I’m not sure the supernatural brings the alien fish closer to the surface as much as it gives us a way to make the deep dive.

  What does it feel like to have a book release and press cycle in the middle of a pandemic?

  This is a wild time to be doing, well, anything — including publishing a book. This is my first virtual tour, so a lot feels different. I’ll probably have more to say about this once I’m on the other side of the tour, but for now I almost feel like a publishing beginner again, which I have to say is kind of fun.

  This is a gross, if helpful, oversimplification, but I feel like a trend both personally and socially is that the pandemic has revealed bare truths about our lives and the structures that make them up. Has this moment revealed anything to you about fiction’s role to the world and to you personally?

  I do think that’s true, yes. For so many people, the pandemic has intensified the structural instabilities in their lives and communities. All of a sudden life goes from being barely sustainable to absolutely unsustainable. For others, the pandemic has made visible and real these instabilities for the first time (and of course it takes a lot of privilege to only now be becoming alert to them). I hope any lingering illusions about this country’s relationship to equality and justice have been shattered this year.

  For me, fiction is so much about pulling back the surface layers and diving into those more submerged waters — and the supernatural in particular specializes in excavating matter that has been ignored, overlooked, buried, etc. I will always be drawn to fiction that chooses truth over illusion — even if it uses tricks of illusion to get there.

• The Shipman Agency - https://www.theshipmanagency.com/laura-van-den-berg

  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.”

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  “As enchanting as fairy tales, as mysterious as dreams, these exquisitely composed fictions are as urgent and original as any being written today.”
  — Sigrid Nunez
  “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.”
  — Lauren Groff
  “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. ”
  — NPR
  “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.”
  — The Washington Post
  Laura van den Berg’s most recent book is the widely praised short story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (FSG, 2020) , which NPR called “exquisite.” Her next novel is State of Paradise, which will be published by FSG in Summer 2024. Other books include the novel The Third Hotel (FSG, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and two other collections of stories, The Isle ofYouth (FSG, 2013), and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), as well as the novel Find Me (FSG, 2015).

  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. Her next novel, Florida Diary, is forthcoming from FSG in summer 2024.

  Born and raised in Florida, Laura lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the writer Paul Yoon, and their dog, Oscar.

Find Me

Laura van den Berg. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-0-374-15471-4

The debut novel from van den Berg brings the lightly speculative touch to real-world longing that characterizes her collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, but against an apocalyptic backdrop that, at first, feels all too familiar. As a mysterious illness spreads across the world, a 19-year-old orphan girl called Joy Jones is living as ward of the sinister Hospital, along with other immune children, subject to the strange experiments of Dr. Bek, whose interest in Joy extends beyond medical inquiry. Indeed, amid an "epidemic of forgetting," Joy fights for her memories of life, and hopes to be somehow reunited with her mother, whom she believes to be a nautical detective, a finder of lost ships, operating off the coast of Florida. Hoping to escape the fate of the Hospital's other residents and nurtured by rumors of the outside world, Joy journeys from Kansas City to Florida, chasing visions alongside her only companion, a boy in a rubber mask named Marcus. This post-Hospital half of the novel plays to van den Berg's strengths, with wild excursions into dangerous new environments populated by memorable oddballs, never losing sight of the emotional core of Joy's quest. The earlier chapters are hampered by future-isms that are cliche and conclusions that feel tedious or foregone--but in Joy, van den Berg has created a voice that never feels false, only lost and dreaming of being found. (Feb.)

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"Find Me." Publishers Weekly, vol. 261, no. 38, 22 Sept. 2014, p. 45. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A383853842/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=180c3169. Accessed 25 May 2024.

van den Berg, Laura FIND ME Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 17 ISBN: 978-0-374-15471-4

In the last days of modern civilization, a young orphan from Boston makes her way across the dangerous wastelands of America. This is not an adventure for her. Post-apocalyptic novels can bend in a lot of directions--in the past decade we've seen the murky emotional depths of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the political metaphor of World War Z by Max Brooks, and the fragile state of fear of Edan Lepucki's California. This debut novel by acclaimed short story writer van den Berg (The Isle of Youth, 2013, etc.) tends to lean much closer to the realms of literary fiction with its complex psychology. Our heroine is the ironically named Joy Jones, an emotionally barren young woman with no family or friends who now slogs at a day job under the influence of a soul-deadening amount of cough syrup. She's not the most ebullient spirit even before a modern plague strikes, killing half the world. She's given to saying things like, "I wonder if I will ever know what it's like to feel at peace," and "No one will ever write a Wikipedia page for me." As hundreds of thousands of victims succumb, Joy is taken to a hospital complex in Kansas where she's subjected to strange tests both medical and psychological, has emotionless sex with her roommate and recoils at the deaths of twin boys. While at the hospital, Joy learns that her long-lost mother is an underwater archaeologist featured in a series of television documentaries that she watches like they are her only lifeline. The remainder of the book covers Joy's trek to find her mother, traveling in the company of Marcus, a boy who shared one of her many foster homes. Van den Berg's writing is curiously beautiful, and her portrayals can also be disarmingly sensitive, as if we might break this girl just by reading about her. "I've grown up knowing the world is fragile," she says. "No one needs to tell me that." A sad story about a sad girl slouching toward the end of the world.

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"van den Berg, Laura: FIND ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2014. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A391851469/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a6b8668b. Accessed 25 May 2024.

Laura van den Berg's debut novel, Find Me (U 1/15), published after two well-received story collections (The Isle of Youth and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us), is getting rave reviews. LJ reviewer Christine DeZelar-Tiedman gave it a star, deemed it "highly recommended," and compared the literary postapocalyptic novel to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. In this interview, van den Berg discusses the world she creates, the popularity of dystopian fiction, and her own reading interests.

What do you think accounts for the appeal of postapocalyptic fiction? What interested you in setting your novel in such a time?

I have been thinking a lot about this question, given the big wave of dystopian literature we've been seeing.

I actually started the book in 2008, so I wasn't influenced by current trends, but I think it's no accident that our increasingly anxious times--the environment, Illness, economic and political disparities--have produced books that are concerned with catastrophe. But I wonder how new this is, really, because while we're seeing a very concentrated wave of end times books right now, dystopian literature has, of course, a long and rich tradition, so perhaps every generation experiences moments where their way of life feels unsustainable and is moved to respond.

In my case, In 2008 we were crawling out of the Bush years, and our way of life had felt pretty dark and unsustainable to me for a while. My aspiration was to create an American landscape that was unstable and surreal and damaged and, In some ways, not so much unlike the country we live In now.

Tell us about your main character, Joy, and the qualities she has not just to survive the world you created, but to search through that world for what is lost.

Joy is searching and tenacious--qualities that sometimes get her into trouble but are, ultimately, saving. Also, Joy's childhood has taught her a lot about how to navigate disaster. She knows how to watch, how to hide, how and when to run. This knowledge has, of course, come at a huge cost, but it is nevertheless helpful in the After.

One of the most striking elements of the first part of your novel are the Pilgrim characters--people who come to stand outside of the hospital in which Joy and the others immune to the memory sickness are held. You keep their motivations and histories intriguingly vague. What do they represent in the novel?

At first, the Pilgrims were a way to Introduce an exterior narrative into the isolated world of the hospital; something alive in the landscape that Joy and the other characters can track. But the presence of the Pilgrims, the way they allow Joy to observe life carrying on In the outside world, also pave the way for eventual escape from the hospital. They help open up a door inside her.

Find Me is divided into two parts, each very different in tone and feel. What motivated you to write a somewhat realistic opening and a deeply surreal second half? How do you hope readers relate to each section?

I Imagined the two parts standing in opposition to each other in some ways: landlocked and cold vs. a movement toward coast and water and warmth; stasis vs. Foaming; coolness vs. heat in terms of Joy's voice. But there are also some parallels and mirrors in terms of how the two books relate. For example, you could see Nelson and the mansion as Book Two's version of the hospital and Dr. Bek, in a through-the-looking-glass kind of way. My aspiration was for the reader to see the interplay between the two worlds, and also for Book Two to offer some relief from the cold and the stasis of the hospital.

If you could describe Find Me in three words, what would they be?

Haunted, surreal, searching.

How do you pick books to read?

I love strong, Idiosyncratic voices in fiction. Often I'll stand in a bookstore and peruse opening paragraphs, waiting for a voice to grab me.

Could you suggest a few books that you have deeply enjoyed and want to share with others?

Some recent titles I've loved include Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows, Sarah Gerard's Binary Star, and Rachel Cusk's Outline.

Wyatt, Neal

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Wyatt, Neal. "Q&A Laura van den Berg." Library Journal, vol. 140, no. 7, 15 Apr. 2015, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A409550287/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=00114fb6. Accessed 25 May 2024.

VAN DEN BERG, Laura. Find Me. 288p. Farrar. 2015. Tr $26. ISBN 9780374154714.

The world is starting to fall apart just as Joy begins putting herself back together. Abandoned by her mother at birth and raised in several foster care and group home situations, Joy has struggled to find direction. When a deadly sickness spreads across the country, first stripping people of their memories and then propelling them from dementia to death, Joy finds out she is immune to this disease and is admitted to a hospital that is looking for a cure. She uses this time to reflect on her life thus far and make a plan to track down her birth mother. The first-person narration allows readers to follow the story through Joy's changing perspective, which creates a mood that subtly moves from ambivalence to determination. Teens will be compelled to discover more about the mystery of the illness, and themes of survival and self-discovery will resonate with them. This debut novel's interesting exploration of how people behave during times of crisis mixed with the dynamics of hospital living is a combination of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (Turtle Bay Bks., 1993) and Josh Malerman's Bird Box (Ecco, 2014). VERDICT Give this to introspective teens who enjoy postapocalyptic stories and lyrical language.--Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ

KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or In the same genre | e eBook original Tr Hardcover trade binding | RTE Reinforced trade binding | lib. ed. Publisher's library binding Board Board book | pap. Paperback | BL Bilingual

Shaurette, Carrie

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Shaurette, Carrie. "Van Den Berg, Laura. Find Me." School Library Journal, vol. 61, no. 10, Oct. 2015, p. 123. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A431724977/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b8f94c3a. Accessed 25 May 2024.

van den Berg, Laura THE THIRD HOTEL Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $25.00 8, 7 ISBN: 978-0-374-16835-3

Grappling with the sudden death of her husband, a new widow floats through the streets of Havana--where she seems to see him everywhere.

Clare arrives in Havana for the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema alone; her husband, Richard, a scholar of horror films, was supposed to attend--he had been particularly interested in a film called Revolucion Zombi--but he can't, because he's dead. Five weeks earlier, he was killed in a hit-and-run in New Scotland, outside of Albany, New York, his book unfinished. "As a married couple, they'd had perfect years and they'd had shit years," van den Berg (Find Me, 2015, etc.) writes, "but she had never in her life experienced a year that so thoroughly dismantled her with confusion." They'd become unknowable to each other in the months before Richard's death. " 'Who are you?' they seemed to always be whispering to each other, in this peculiar middle passage of their lives. 'What are you becoming?'" The night before he died, he'd said they needed to talk, but then he died, so they never did. And then, outside the Museum of the Revolution in Havana, she sees him: Richard, in a suit she's never seen, staring up at the sky. She follows him through the city: buying mangoes from a fruit cart, reading the paper at a cafe. In this surreal dreamscape, Clare's past blends with her present as she reflects backward, recounting her childhood in Florida, where her parents managed a hotel; her career as an elevator technologies Midwest sales rep; her father's death; her relationship with her husband, which is still unfolding in the present; and her own role in his strange and sudden death. Laced through with sharp insights--not just on marriage and grief, but also on the pull of travel and the dynamics of horror movies--the layers of the novel fit together so seamlessly they're almost Escher-esque. The line between the real and the imagined is forever blurry, and the result of all that ambiguity is both moving and unsettling.

Gorgeously haunting and wholly original; a novel that rewards patience.

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"van den Berg, Laura: THE THIRD HOTEL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A540723417/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da5600c6. Accessed 25 May 2024.

THE THIRD HOTEL By Laura van den Berg FSG $26, 224 pages ISBN 9780374168353 eBook available

How well can one know oneself? Laura van den Berg's eerie yet compelling second novel, The Third Hotel, explores this question with a clanging loneliness, like a wrench falling down an elevator shaft.

Clare, troubled and newly widowed, travels to Havana, Cuba, for a horror film festival that her late husband had planned to attend. From the onset, everything is strange, creating a bleak space between Clare and the reader. Just when the reader starts to question Clare's reliability as a narrator, Clare spots Richard, her dead husband, in the streets of Havana. She follows him and spies on him for several days, but she's less like a devastated lover who can't believe her eyes and more like a cool and distant voyeur. She follows him to a resort (or is it a mental health facility?), where they have a literal post-mortem on their relationship that leaves Clare grappling with the reality of her role in their marriage.

A major theme of this slim novel is mystery: the nature of Richard's hit-and-run death; the contents of a simple package he left behind; the actuality of the man Clare is following in Havana. Did she find Richard, or someone who looks like Richard, or is she just imagining him altogether? All the alternatives seem equally plausible through van den Berg's adeptly disorienting storytelling. An equally important theme is the undead, whether it be Richard, zombies in the festival's films or inescapable memories that dig their way to the surface.

Clare is so aloof that it's hard to picture her ever connecting with Richard in the past, though van den Berg supplies occasional flashbacks that reveal their somewhat joyous union. A little slow to start, the pace picks up in the second half as clues planted by the author come full circle.

The Third Hotel is a chilly, thought-provoking study of loss, loneliness and life after death.

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Hinson, Leslie. "THE THIRD HOTEL." BookPage, Aug. 2018, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A547988066/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bebfb81e. Accessed 25 May 2024.

THE THIRD HOTEL By Laura van den Berg 224 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

''The Third Hotel,'' Laura van den Berg's enigmatic second novel, opens in Cuba, where its protagonist, an American sales representative for an elevator company, has come to attend a film festival. That protagonist, Clare, is something of a cipher to those around her -- and, perhaps more significantly, to herself as well. ''I am not who you think I am,'' she imagines telling a hypothetical acquaintance on the book's first page. ''I am experiencing a dislocation of reality.''

Such questions of Clare's identity and the nature of reality abound throughout this always vivid, occasionally languid and intermittently frustrating book, beginning with its central plot device: the appearance, outside Havana's Museum of the Revolution, of her husband, Richard, a film studies professor who was killed in a hit-and-run incident five weeks before.

Is this Richard a ghost? An impostor? Is Clare hallucinating, or has she slipped into an alternate reality in which her husband is still alive? She follows him through the museum and back out into the courtyard, where he jumps onto a motorbike and disappears into traffic.

It was Richard who initially wanted to visit Havana, for research; he hoped to study a new Cuban horror film, ''Revolucion Zombi,'' which is debuting at the festival. Clare attends in his stead, puzzles over the movie's lead actress who has gone missing, and falls in with some friendly film critics. Through flashbacks, we learn that Clare and Richard's marriage was distant, peculiar, perhaps in crisis; she spent most of her time traveling for work, and he took long, mysterious walks by himself. It was during one of these walks that Richard was killed. He was found to have been carrying a mysterious small white box, taped shut; Clare has brought it with her to Cuba, and still hasn't opened it.

Clare, we learn, has a penchant for questions unanswered, spaces unfilled, silences unbroken. On business trips, her favorite activity is ''to switch off every light and everything that made a sound -- TV, phone, air-conditioner, faucets -- and sit naked on the polyester comforter and count the breaths as they left her body.'' She brings a Patricia Highsmith novel on her travels but never gets past the first few paragraphs; she shows up for a movie screening but never enters the theater. A woman mistakes her for someone else and Clare doesn't correct the error; later she contemplates the ''near-radical act'' of marrying without the intent to have children. She longs to ''be free of past and future, of memory and feeling.''

If Clare is obsessed with negation and absence, ''The Third Hotel'' is eager to abet her: The book enthusiastically (and, I presume, deliberately) derails itself again and again. Scenes begin with clear goals in mind, then are sidetracked; questions, pointedly asked, go unanswered. In a series of truncated flashbacks, Clare's father says something ''that left her unable to speak in anything but sentence fragments for days,'' but we aren't told what it is. She finds a small red notebook, opens it, ''then closed it just as quickly, feeling like she had been slapped.'' What was written in it? The novel won't say. Clare is struck speechless by an envelope she receives from her father whose contents she does not reveal. When a phone rings in this book, you can be sure the resulting conversation will be cut short, if it happens at all; there's usually a silence on the other end, or an inscrutable voice, or static.

What we get instead of narrative momentum is a richness of theme and an abundance of detail. Van den Berg's previous work, her short stories in particular, are prized for their thoughtfulness and descriptive intensity, and this book seems to me a refinement and intensification of those skills. She portrays present-day Havana as a collision of past and present, of cultural influence and personal eccentricity, and the act of travel as a radical form of recontextualization and displacement. I found myself mildly vexed by the novel's forays into travelogue, but there's no denying the author's skill at rendering this material; her sentences, at their best, are extraordinarily lucid, lodging places and people indelibly in memory. These descriptive passages may come off to some readers as clutter, but they serve to ground a story that sometimes feels elusive and vague.

The novel's intellectual and philosophical excursions are less successful, to my mind, than its concrete descriptions. Although the themes themselves -- the enigma of the self, the implications of framing in film, the gendered politics of intimacy -- are compelling, the novel too frequently wears them on its sleeve. Van den Berg cites a great deal of research in her acknowledgments, and the reader feels that research acutely; excerpts from Richard's film criticism neatly parallel Clare's experiences (''Screens were vehicles for the subjective,'' she recalls him having written), and characters often bluntly state the novel's themes, like the random guy who tells her, ''Our phones make sure we know too much and too little all at the same time,'' or the eccentric professor who goofily intones, ''The Big Questions ask us.'' Passages like these take us outside the novel's imaginative world and remind us that the author exists, and has something to tell us.

But perhaps this is a feature, not a bug. A counterargument might go like this: ''The Third Hotel'' is at its best when it makes no claim to psychological realism. It is in its weirdest passages that a reader is most likely to accept, even embrace, these instances of arch self-consciousness; at these times the book is thrilling, its own self-contained universe of metaphor and coincidence, and it makes its reader feel smart.

At other times, though, when the novel most resembles a police procedural, ghost story or other familiar form, it can seem withholding. On the one hand it wants to tantalize us with its open questions, but on the other there is no diegetic impediment to immediate answers. Most of the mysteries in ''The Third Hotel'' aren't Clare's to solve; she already knows what the envelope contains, or what her father said, or what is written in the notebook. She could open the white box anytime she wants. These narrative devices, designed to intrigue, risk annoying instead: The book conceals vital information for no clear reason other than to create gratuitous suspense.

Van den Berg appears to know this, and attempts to defend it from inside the fortress of the narrative: ''Americans like straight answers,'' Clare cheekily tells a new friend, and we feel a bit of authorial side-eye. ''We like simple stories.'' Well, sometimes we do. But van den Berg's readers are looking not for simplicity but for a bit of clarity, and ''The Third Hotel'' doesn't always deliver it.

It does, however, eventually bring its various plotlines to a close, and reveals much (though not all) of what it's been hiding from us. I'll abide by Richard's injunction to ''never give away the ending,'' but I'll say this: Whether these revelations satisfy depends heavily upon the reader's expectations. My advice: Don't take the bait when ''The Third Hotel'' starts voguing like a thriller. Instead, read it as the inscrutable future cult classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its twisting, unsettling currents.

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PHOTO: Laura van den Berg (PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL YOON)

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Lennon, J. Robert. "Novel, Interrupted." The New York Times Book Review, 22 July 2018, p. 20(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A547175460/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=632f1b89. Accessed 25 May 2024.

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HOST: SCOTT SIMON

SCOTT SIMON: Clare, a recently widowed woman who's at the center of Laura van den Berg's new novel, goes to a movie one night at the Havana Film Festival and sees the last person she'd expect, her late husband. He's wearing a white linen suit. She follows him through the streets but never speaks, as the novelist writes, she was afraid that if she spoke, he might disappear.

Laura van den Berg has written what amounts to a shape-shifter of a novel, where Clare searches for clarity and finality in a world that keeps changing, flashing and rearranging itself. Laura van den Berg's novel is "The Third Hotel." And Laura van den Berg, who's previously published collections of stories and a novel and lectures at Harvard joins us from WGBH in Boston. Thanks so much for being with us.

LAURA VAN DEN BERG: Thank you so much for having me, Scott.

SIMON: Richard, her late husband, or husband who may be late - I don't want to give anything away - was a critic of horror films. So this sort of falls into place, doesn't it?

VAN DEN BERG: It does. Yes. I am a longtime fan of the genre, so process-wise, one thing that was fun and interesting about working on "The Third Hotel" was getting to sort of dig deeper into the genre.

SIMON: What is it about you and horror?

VAN DEN BERG: Well, I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality. Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions.

If I may, there's a really fantastic horror movie called "The Babadook." And it centers around a mother-son relationship. And this mother is raising her son as a widow, and so they're on their own. And the son is having trouble. And they both become very isolated. And then, they begin to be menaced by this creature, this outside force.

And that's a movie that really beautifully navigates the ambiguity of - is there a monster in the house in the literal sense, or is this sort of feeling of the monstrous being generated by the psychic state of the characters? And I think that's the sort of aspect of horror, the strand of horror that interests me most powerfully in terms of narrative.

SIMON: Clare, who is 37 during the course of this novel, says she knew back in her 20s - I truly admire this phrase - that the ice cube she had pressed against her heart in childhood was proving slow to thaw. What is that ice cube? What's in it?

VAN DEN BERG: I think for Clare, you know, the ice cube is made up of several different frozen parts. I mean, she has a particular relationship to travel and tourism as an adult. She travels - she's a sales rep, so she's on the road constantly. She was also raised by - in an inn. Her parents were innkeepers in North Florida, so she grew up being the kind of fixed person in a fixed space that tourists who are visiting that part of Florida are coming to see.

So I think for Clare, you know, some of her adult transience is born of a desire to get away from certain aspects of her life and to not confront certain things. And so perhaps that tendency towards flight has, you know, kept that ice cube a little bit more frozen than it might be otherwise.

SIMON: May I ask, where does Clare come from in your mind?

VAN DEN BERG: I think Clare is a composite of a lot of different people and, you know, and places. There's a chapter that comes early in the novel that just sort of details the various odd encounters and odd discoveries she's made while on the road. And that was a chapter that I wrote while I was traveling quite a lot.

And, you know, and I found all kinds of strange things, you know, in the backs of seat pockets on planes and in hotel room drawers and had, you know, curious conversations with people while, you know, checking into a hotel and so on.

SIMON: You mean you would find things people had left in the seat pockets?

VAN DEN BERG: Yes. People had left - yes, exactly. Yeah. I mean, there's this sort of strange blend of anonymity and intimacy to travel, I think, into transit spaces where we're seeing these intimate details of people's lives, but it's not really something we sort of engage in or comment on. And so, you know, she's a hybrid in that way of real sort of tactile experience on my part, and then just wild flights of imagination.

SIMON: The question that kept coming back to me as a reader is, is Clare seeing things, or is she conjuring things?

VAN DEN BERG: I don't know that I necessarily have a, you know, clear-cut answer to that. I mean, I'm - I think both of those things can occur sort of simultaneously - that you can - you know, something can be the product of one's imagination and also feel completely real.

And I, actually, am sort of in recovery from fairly serious flying anxiety, but there was a time where flying was very difficult for me. And I, you know, would get on a plane. And the plane would take off. And I would be absolutely convinced with all of my heart and brain that the plane was going to drop out of the sky and crash at any moment. And I know intellectually that that's not true. I've read the statistics. I know how improbable that is. But yet, there is this other part of my imagination that just takes over, and it's so powerful. And it generates a physical response, too, you know? I'd have panic attacks and hyperventilate on planes and so on - my poor seatmates.

But it's - so I'm really interested in sort of the way, you know, our imaginations can create a state of being that might be fictional, but it's still a real thing that's happening at the same time.

SIMON: I must salute your courage for taking off anyway.

VAN DEN BERG: Yes. I know. Well, if you've got to get somewhere, you've just got to get there (laughter).

SIMON: Laura van den Berg - her novel, "The Third Hotel." Thanks very much. And if I may, safe travels.

VAN DEN BERG: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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"A Rearranging World In 'The Third Hotel'." Weekend Edition Saturday, 4 Aug. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A549201973/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e2deffed. Accessed 25 May 2024.

Byline: Randy Rosenthal

The Third Hotel

By Laura van den Berg

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 212 pp. $26

---

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 Bolano, Kafka and Cortazar, 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.

The novel begins when its heroine, Clare, travels to Havana for a Latin American film festival. Her husband, Richard, is a film studies professor specializing in horror, and it's horror that sets the tone. Five weeks earlier, Richard was hit by a car and died. Grieving, Clare goes alone, and some time after a being in Cuba, she suspects something strange might be happening, "a world opening within another."

As the pendulum of narration swings between where she finds herself in the present and her past, it becomes clear Clare is unhinged, wild. People notice. "The grieving are very dangerous," someone tells her. "They are like injured animals with fearsome claws, bloodied and pushed into a corner." She's told she's deranged. And she just might be. Not only because she's a serial liar and eats paper, but because the person who tells her this is her dead husband.

Just after watching the only horror film of the festival, she sees Richard. Understandably startled, she follows him into a museum - only to scare him away and lose him. But she deliberately misses her flight home, finds Richard again and stalks him around Havana, eventually chasing him across the island and into the Escambray Mountains, where she can finally ask him some questions. His answers unsettle her more than the possibility of talking to a ghost. Birthplace of the zombie and voodoo, the Caribbean is no stranger to the supernatural, and Clare's uncanny experiences feel right at home there.

The fantastic plot is elevated by van den Berg's fantastic writing and unique twists of language. Clare, who is now 37, knew back in her 20s that "the ice cube she had pressed against her heart in childhood was proving slow to thaw." When speaking with a colleague, Clare "had searched for the scent of mistrust in the air." Of the dementia killing Clare's father, it came on rapidly, but "the end had been encoded inside him all along." "The mind," van den Berg writes, "contained a million half-open doors and they could become closed or swing open at any time, by virtue of remembering or forgetting or illness or petrified avoidance." These sentences aren't flourishes of showoff; nothing unoriginal slips by in this flawless novel. Even a pastor's shoes are described as "the shoes of unemployed professors at academic conferences. They were the shoes people get buried in."

Then there are larger aspects of the fantastic. Not only the implications of the miraculous, but "there was a mystery at hand, and Clare had given herself the role of solving it." There are, in fact, many mysteries. Why is Richard in Cuba? Why did he change so much over the months preceding his death? And what's inside the box he was carrying when he died, the little white cardboard gift box Clare hasn't yet the nerve to open? She carries the sealed box to Cuba, sporadically taking it out and wondering what could be inside. It's such a simple but brilliant plot device. If the black box is the part of our minds we can't access, what's a white box? The memories we can reach, if only we want to open the box and look?

Yes, van den Berg knows what she's doing. And she wants the reader to know she knows. While traveling, Clare reads Patricia Highsmith's "The Two Faces of January," which she finds unsettling. Not because of the story, but because of "the hidden things she sensed quivering under the surface. Subtext, she supposed this was called, and she did not care for it." Maybe Clare doesn't, but the author must, because so much subtextual lava is coursing under the surface of every page of "The Third Hotel" the book feels like it's going to erupt in your hands.

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Rosenthal's work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily and other publications.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post
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Rosenthal, Randy. "Book World: The fantastic world of Laura van den Berg." Washington Post, 19 July 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A547021301/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8cf776dd. Accessed 25 May 2024.

van den Berg, Laura I HOLD A WOLF BY THE EARS Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Fiction None) $26.00 6, 9 ISBN: 978-0-374-10209-8

Identity, like reality, is a slippery thing for the women in van den Berg’s latest collection of short stories, all of whom are grasping at a sense of stability that seems forever out of reach.

All 11 stories here are sharp as they are haunting; in this world—maybe like the real one—nothing is exactly what it seems. In “Cult of Mary,” which is as short as it is devastating, a daughter takes her aging mother on a quietly gut-wrenching group tour of Italy. Against the backdrop of an earthquake-ravaged Mexico City, “Karolina” a divorcing art restorer, runs into her brother’s now-destitute ex-wife and is forced to confront truths about her brother she has managed until now to willfully ignore. In “Lizards,” a husband plies his unhappy wife with cans of special sparkling water, off-brand LaCroix but with sedative properties, for when she “simply becomes too much.” And doesn’t she also, in a way, appreciate the dulling of her own mind? “The truth is that she is angriest at her own anger,” van den Berg explains, “which she suspects has arrived far too late to be of any real use.” Other stories have a darkly surreal edge, like sweaty, hyper-realistic nightmares; someone has always disappeared or is in the process of disappearing: A husband vanishes into a tree; a woman is casually kidnapped by her new friend. In the title story, a woman named Margot semiaccidentally begins impersonating her missing sister at an Italian academic conference. They are raw and searching, the women at the centers of these stories. She didn’t want her sister’s life, Margot thinks. “All she wants is to feel like she isn’t being destroyed by the world.” The stories here, vibrating with loss, but wickedly funny, are a distinctly van den Berg–ian hybrid, as biting as they are dreamy.

Witty, painful, and thoroughly unsettling.

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"van den Berg, Laura: I HOLD A WOLF BY THE EARS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A620268174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=452befad. Accessed 25 May 2024.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. By Laura Van den Berg. July 2020. 224p. Farrar, $26 (9780374102098).

After two novels, Van den Berg (The Third Hotel, 2018) returns to short stories in a richly imaginative collection that skillfully exposes vulnerable women to grief, messy relationships, misogyny, and prejudices, while equipping them with a fiery tenacity. A woman reminisces about her ominous exit from a mental institution. A photographer encounters a neighbor who caters to clients obsessed with dacryphilia (finding pleasures in the tears of others). A wife prods her reluctant husband to confront a mystery haunting his family. An irascible wife is placated with a peculiar tonic by her frustrated husband in "Lizards." In "Volcano House," a woman questions a wasted life while her accomplished sister lies in a coma. In "Karolina," a woman reexamines her judgment of a hot-tempered brother when her ex-sister-in-law resurfaces. A gig worker experiences the hazards of working as an escort to grieving husbands disguised as their deceased wives. In the title story (taken from a Latin proverb, "Auribus teneo lupum," to be caught in an untenable situation), a stranded woman has no choice but to impersonate her AWOL sister. In these 11 perceptive stories, Van den Berg displays her literary talents with acerbic acumen as she portrays indelible characters brimming with verve that is hungry and wild. --Andrienne Cruz

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Cruz, Andrienne. "I Hold a Wolf by the Ears." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 19-20, 1 June 2020, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A628068776/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fe250e52. Accessed 25 May 2024.

van den Berg, Laura. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories. Farrar. Jun. 2020.224p. ISBN 9780374102098. $26. F

In her newest short fiction collection, van den Berg (The Third Hotel) serves up an assortment of complex and satisfying not quite--ghost stories. These deceptively dense tales often visit similar territory--women, less successful younger sisters or slightly flawed daughters, who have missed some imperceptible benchmark in life--yet there is no sense of sameness. Rather, in stories ranging from "Your Second Wife," in which a woman makes a living impersonating dead spouses, to the discomfiting "Karolina," where in the aftermath of a Mexico City earthquake a woman's homeless sister-in-law forces her to confront a buried history of family violence, van den Berg mines the broad overlap among loss, defeat, and horror with a deft touch, backlit by the unsettling effects of travel, natural disasters, death, and that thin membrane between the supernatural and the simply strange. The ghosts in her stories are her narrators' better, unachieved selves, the dread embodied in the realization of how easy it is to miss life's transitions from before to after. VERDICT These well-crafted and intelligent stories about the many ways a life can be haunted will gratify readers who enjoy perceptive, slightly gothic tales.--Lisa Peet, Library Journal

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Peet, Lisa. "van den Berg, Laura. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories." Library Journal, vol. 145, no. 5, May 2020, p. 114. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A622556172/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=72fdddbf. Accessed 25 May 2024.

Laura van den Berg. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (224p) ISBN 978-0-374-10209-8

In van den Berg's startling, precise collection (after The Third Hotel), a series of women are haunted by various disturbances, often in Florida. "Last Night" sets the tone with an unnamed narrator spooked by the sudden closure of the bar downstairs from her apartment, causing her to look back on her would-be suicide many years earlier, when, as a teenager, she spent 10 months at a lax Florida psychiatric treatment facility for her suicidal idearion. "Slumberland" follows a woman's aimless walks outside Orlando, Fla., during which she phorographs the transient residents of a seedy motel while reflecting on her own state of impermanence. In "Lizards," a woman is outraged by news reports of a judge's alleged sexual assaults. Her husband, skeptical and fatigued by her talking, pacifies her with a sedative-laced seltzer he finds online. "Your Second Wife" follows a woman thrust into the desperation of the gig economy who becomes a "grief freelancer," playing the roles of widowers' dead wives. In the title story, the collection's thematic climax, a woman poses as her more successful sister; her actions inform the various ways that the women in van den Berg's stories often succumb to self-erasure or are erased by others. Van den Berg maintains an unsettling tone throughout these darkly imagined tales. This collection shows' the author at her best. (June)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
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"I Hold a Wolf by the Ears." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 7, 17 Feb. 2020, p. 171. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A615711353/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9c45f613. Accessed 25 May 2024.

van den Berg, Laura STATE OF PARADISE Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Fiction None) $27.00 7, 9 ISBN: 9780374612207

A woman returns to the Florida of her childhood and is destabilized by the collision of her present and her past.

"How did we end up here, shipwrecked at my mother's house?" This is the question the narrator of van den Berg's new novel asks herself. On a literal level, the narrator and her husband--a historian working on a book about medieval pilgrimages--has moved back in with her mother in northern Florida to care for her dying father and then stayed on as the pandemic struck. (To complicate the dynamics, the narrator's sister and her small family live right next door.) But this shipwrecking is as much emotional as geographical. Living in Florida means being surrounded by ghosts--the ghost of the narrator's dead father, her niece's "pet ghost," her own job as a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author, and, most of all, "all [her] former selves for company." These haunts eradicate the boundaries the narrator has put up between her current life and her younger years, some of which were spent institutionalized after a suicide attempt. Surrounding everything is the "equal parts danger and magic" of Florida, both agonizingly real--its politics, its weather, its wildlife--and speculative, as people in the narrator's area begin to go missing and the rest of the population is transfixed by a sophisticated virtual reality technology called MIND'S EYE. 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 are 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.

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"van den Berg, Laura: STATE OF PARADISE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f14125ad. Accessed 25 May 2024.

"Find Me." Publishers Weekly, vol. 261, no. 38, 22 Sept. 2014, p. 45. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A383853842/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=180c3169. Accessed 25 May 2024. "van den Berg, Laura: FIND ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2014. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A391851469/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a6b8668b. Accessed 25 May 2024. Wyatt, Neal. "Q&A Laura van den Berg." Library Journal, vol. 140, no. 7, 15 Apr. 2015, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A409550287/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=00114fb6. Accessed 25 May 2024. Shaurette, Carrie. "Van Den Berg, Laura. Find Me." School Library Journal, vol. 61, no. 10, Oct. 2015, p. 123. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A431724977/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b8f94c3a. Accessed 25 May 2024. "van den Berg, Laura: THE THIRD HOTEL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A540723417/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da5600c6. Accessed 25 May 2024. Hinson, Leslie. "THE THIRD HOTEL." BookPage, Aug. 2018, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A547988066/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bebfb81e. Accessed 25 May 2024. Lennon, J. Robert. "Novel, Interrupted." The New York Times Book Review, 22 July 2018, p. 20(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A547175460/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=632f1b89. Accessed 25 May 2024. "A Rearranging World In 'The Third Hotel'." Weekend Edition Saturday, 4 Aug. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A549201973/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e2deffed. Accessed 25 May 2024. Rosenthal, Randy. "Book World: The fantastic world of Laura van den Berg." Washington Post, 19 July 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A547021301/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8cf776dd. Accessed 25 May 2024. "van den Berg, Laura: I HOLD A WOLF BY THE EARS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A620268174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=452befad. Accessed 25 May 2024. Cruz, Andrienne. "I Hold a Wolf by the Ears." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 19-20, 1 June 2020, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A628068776/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fe250e52. Accessed 25 May 2024. Peet, Lisa. "van den Berg, Laura. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories." Library Journal, vol. 145, no. 5, May 2020, p. 114. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A622556172/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=72fdddbf. Accessed 25 May 2024. "I Hold a Wolf by the Ears." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 7, 17 Feb. 2020, p. 171. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A615711353/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9c45f613. Accessed 25 May 2024. "van den Berg, Laura: STATE OF PARADISE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f14125ad. Accessed 25 May 2024.

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