Laura Van Den Berg
Laura Van Den Berg has published 11 books across 3 series. The recommended reading order starts with Brevity and Echo (2006).
Laura van den Berg is an American writer who works in both the short story and the novel, bringing a sharp psychological edge to fiction that explores memory, identity, and the strange slippages of reality. Born and raised in Florida, she made her debut with the story collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, which became a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her first novel, Find Me, arrived in 2016 and was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, establishing her as a novelist with the same unsettling vision that marked her stories.
Shelf & Shadows
Order of Anthologies
- Tags---DescriptionBrevity and Echo is an anthology of flash fiction by Emerson College alumni, first published in 2006 as part of the Order of Anthologies series. The collection gathers short shorts that range from 55 to 1400 words, each one a complete story compressed to its essentials. Writers including Don Lee, Denise Duhamel, and Lee Harrington contribute work that originally appeared in McSweeney's, StoryQuarterly, Quick Fiction, and Best American Non-Required Reading, among others. Ron Carlson provides the introduction and Pamela Painter the afterword. Across 168 pages, the anthology demonstrates the range possible within the form — fiction that must earn every word and stop before a reader expects it to.Publication dateDecember 11, 2006Amazon rating4.6/5Print length168LanguageEnglishPublisherRose Metal Press
- DescriptionMud Men, mummies, and MothMan take center stage in this 2012 anthology of monster stories. Monsters of Literary Sightings gathers work from writers including Bonnie Jo Campbell, Ben Percy, and Aimee Bender, each bringing a different creature from American folklore and collective nightmare into vivid existence. Part of the Order of Anthologies series, the collection transforms shared fears and fascinations into 212 pages of encounters with what lurks at the edges of the familiar.Publication dateFebruary 20, 2012Amazon rating2.8/5Print length212LanguageEnglishPublisherPressgang
- Tags---DescriptionAn American soldier designs a new kind of Trojan horse — his cremains in a bullet. A squid falls in love with the sun. A girl gives birth to cubs. xo Orpheus is an anthology of fifty myth retellings from around the world, first published in 2013, where Icarus flies again, Aztec jaguar gods stalk the earth, and Orpheus says goodbye to Eurydice one more time. Writers including Aimee Bender, Elizabeth McCracken, Madeline Miller, Kevin Wilson, Emma Straub, Peter Straub, Heidi Julavits, Ron Currie Jr., Maile Meloy, Zachary Mason, and Joy Williams take myths from Greek, Indian, Punjabi, Inuit, and other traditions and pull them into new forms. The collection includes talkative goats, a cat lady, a bird woman, and a beer-drinking ogre alongside the Titans, Lamia the child-eating mistress of Zeus, Galatea, Phaeton, Persephone, Demeter, Narcissus, and Argos, Odysseus' dog. If xo signals a goodbye, then these 576 pages bid farewell to an old way of mythmaking and ask what happens when ancient stories meet extravagant contemporary imagination.Publication date24 September 2013Amazon rating4.2/5Print length576LanguageEnglishPublisherPenguin
- Tags---DescriptionEat Joy is an illustrated essay collection in which literary writers explore how comfort food helps them survive dark times. Lev Grossman turned to General Tso's tofu after his divorce, clinging to its sweet-sour-spicy-salty glue. Carmen Maria Machado learned to feed and care for herself through her twenties, each meal a lesson in growing up. Claire Messud tries to understand why her mother abandoned dreams of becoming a lawyer to spend her days preparing dressed salads of shrimp and avocado, prune-stuffed pork tenderloin on the table by six. Each essay pairs a deeply personal revelation with a recipe, but the stakes go beyond the plate. What these writers are really asking is whether food can carry us through loss, loneliness, heartache, and the ordinary pain of becoming someone new. The question at the center of every story is the same: can the taste of something familiar be the taste of hope. First published in 2019, the collection runs 208 pages and appears in the Order of Anthologies series.Publication dateOctober 29, 2019Amazon rating4.3/5Print length208LanguageEnglishPublisherCatapult
Order of Short Story Collections
- Tagsshort-storiesfantasyDescriptionWhat the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is a 2009 short story collection that places women who narrate its stories at the border between the ordinary and the impossible. A failed actress takes work as a Bigfoot impersonator. A botanist searching for a rare flower crosses paths with men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A missionary in Africa, undone by grief, becomes fixated on a creature said to live in the forests of the Congo. In the title story, a young woman travels with her scientist mother through Madagascar, caught between her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer and the pull of her own emerging sexuality. Each narrator is searching — for absolution, for solace, for proof that something beyond the daily grind might redeem her. The collection appeared in Best Non-Required Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prizes 2010. The question threading through all fourteen stories is whether belief in the mythic — Bigfoot, lake monsters, tunnels to the other side of the world — can fill the gap left by husbands, parents, lovers, and lives that have already slipped away. The women keep looking. Whether they find what they need, or only what they feared, is the risk they take with every step into uncharted territory.Publication dateOctober 1, 2009Amazon rating4.2/5Print length194LanguageEnglishPublisherDzanc Books
- Tagsshort-storiesDescriptionA newlywed wakes inside an inscrutable marriage, unable to decode the man she chose. A teenager assists her magician mother onstage, then works the crowd for wallets and watches. Private investigators chase a baffling case through South Florida, following leads that refuse to resolve. The Isle of Youth, a 2013 story collection, follows women caught in lives built on secrecy and deception. Each woman is vulnerable and dangerous in equal measure, bighearted one moment and ruthless the next. They steal, they lie, they make choices that narrow the world around them. What they want most is survival, but survival demands they grapple with what they have already done — the marriages entered, the crimes committed, the mothers followed into dark work. The clues to their inner worlds are scattered through the wreckage. Whether any of them can piece together who they are, or whether secrecy has already made that impossible, is the question every story turns on.Publication dateNovember 5, 2013Amazon rating3.8/5Print length256LanguageEnglishPublisherFSG Originals
- Tagsshort-storiesmysterysuspensethrillerDescriptionEstranged spouses, individuals chasing transformation, and characters searching for meaning populate There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights, a short story collection where the mundane collides with the strange. Published in 2017, the collection draws readers into lives marked by disconnection and identity crises, where hidden aches surface and unanswered questions refuse to stay buried. The ordinary becomes extraordinary as the stories shift beneath everyday life. A touch of the surreal threads through character-driven narratives that probe psychological depth, turning small moments into mysteries that linger. Each story in the collection explores what happens when people grapple with the parts of themselves they cannot name or solve, when the expected gives way to something just around the corner. The question at the heart of these thirty-six pages is whether any of these characters will find what they are searching for — or whether the search itself is all that remains.Publication dateOctober 2, 2017Amazon rating4.1/5Print length36LanguageEnglishPublisherBull City Press
- TagsfantasyhorrorDescriptionIn Lizards, a man sedates his wife's anxieties with seltzer laced with drugs. In Karolina, a woman finds her ex-sister-in-law after an earthquake and must confront what her brother has done. In the title story, a woman impersonates her more successful sister on a failing Italian vacation, a decision that spirals into strange and destructive consequences. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is a collection of eleven stories, first published in 2020, about women trying to hold on to what remains of their lives — grieving, divorced, searching, vulnerable, unhinged. The stories move from Florida to Mexico City, Sicily, and Iceland, tracking women who exist in a world that looks like ours until you look too closely. Each faces misogyny, violence, or the impossible economics of America, and each stands on the verge of something she cannot name. The question threading through all eleven is whether these women will grasp what is left or let it slip through their fingers entirely.Publication dateJuly 28, 2020Amazon rating4.2/5Print length226LanguageEnglishPublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Order of Standalone Novels
- Tagsdystopianchildrensci-fiDescriptionJoy has no one — just the graveyard shift at a Boston-area grocery store and a cough syrup habit that keeps her past at bay. Then a sickness that starts with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, and Joy discovers she is immune. Find Me is a dystopian novel that follows her from that bleak starting point into a hospital in rural Kansas, where her immunity buys her a bed and a chance to leave her old life behind. The hospital imposes strange treatments and arbitrary rules. Joy forms cautious bonds with the other patients: a roommate she turns to for comfort in the night, twin boys digging a secret tunnel. When winter arrives and the hospital's fragile order collapses, Joy breaks free and sets out across a devastated America. Her destination is Florida, where she believes she can find the birth mother who abandoned her as a child. The road brings mysterious companions, cities gone strange, and one house that refuses to make sense. The closer Joy gets to Florida, the more she must reckon with her own damaged memory and the secrets she has been keeping from herself.Publication dateFebruary 2, 2016Amazon rating3.3/5Print length288LanguageEnglishPublisherFSG Originals
- TagsfantasyhorrormysterysuspensethrillerDescriptionThe Third Hotel is a psychological novel about a widow who sees her dead husband alive in Havana. Clare has traveled to Cuba to attend the Festival of New Latin American Cinema — the trip Richard, a horror film scholar, had planned before he died. Days after she arrives, she spots him outside a museum in a white linen suit she has never seen. He should be dead. She follows him. Clare tracks Richard through the streets of Havana, watching his movements, trying to understand what she is seeing. The city is newly open to tourists, crowded and disorienting, and the line between what is real and what grief has conjured begins to dissolve. As she trails him, Clare returns to memories of her Florida childhood and her marriage to Richard, piecing together the truth about both. What emerges is her own part in his death — and in whatever has brought him back. The question at the center of the novel is whether Richard is actually there or whether Clare has crossed into a place where the difference no longer matters. First published in 2018, The Third Hotel was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award.Publication dateAugust 7, 2018Amazon rating3.3/5Print length224LanguageEnglishPublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- TagsthrillerhorrorDescriptionA ghostwriter living in her mother's Florida home watches her small town slide back into normal after a mysterious illness disappears: sinkholes, torrential rain, ominous cats, and a company called ELECTRA distributing a world-bending virtual reality device. Posters of missing citizens multiply on the streets. State of Paradise is a novel about what happens when the ghostwriter's sister vanishes during a violent rainstorm and returns days later speaking of another dimension. The ghostwriter has been tracking the eerie changes while contending with family secrets, fragmented memories of her troubled youth, a cult gathering in the living room, and her own belly button expanding in ways it should not. She works for a famous thriller author, and the lines between her life and the stories she writes are already slippery. Now her sister's reappearance forces her to investigate not only what happened to the missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, her employer, and the nature of reality itself. The question at the center is whether the other dimension her sister describes is real, and whether the ghostwriter can trust her own memories and perceptions enough to find out.Publication dateJuly 9, 2024Amazon rating3.6/5Print length224LanguageEnglishPublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Frequently Asked Questions about Laura Van Den Berg
Laura Van Den Berg's short story collections and novels can be read in any order. If you are interested in her anthologies, those are also meant to be read as individual works. Her collections of short stories include What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, published in 2009, followed by The Isle of Youth in 2013, There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights in 2017, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories in 2020. Her standalone novels are Find Me (2016), The Third Hotel (2018), and State of Paradise (2024).
A good place to start with Laura Van Den Berg is with her 2020 short story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories. This collection showcases her distinctive voice and ability to craft compelling narratives across a range of themes. Another option is her 2018 novel, The Third Hotel, which explores memory and identity in a surreal setting. Both works offer a strong introduction to her style and the kinds of stories she tells.
No, Laura Van Den Berg's books do not need to be read in any specific order. Her short story collections and standalone novels are independent works. Each collection offers a distinct set of stories, and each novel presents a self-contained narrative. Readers can choose any of her books to begin their exploration of her writing, as there is no overarching plot or continuity connecting them.
Laura Van Den Berg writes standalone novels and collections of short stories. She has published three standalone novels: Find Me (2016), The Third Hotel (2018), and State of Paradise (2024). Her short story collections include 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), and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories (2020).
Laura Van Den Berg has written seven books: three standalone novels and four collections of short stories. Her novels are Find Me (2016), The Third Hotel (2018), and State of Paradise (2024). Her short story collections are 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), and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories (2020).
The first book Laura Van Den Berg wrote was the short story collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, published in 2009. This marked her debut in book form. Prior to this, she contributed to various anthologies. Following this initial collection, she continued to publish short story collections before releasing her first standalone novel.
Laura Van Den Berg's most recent book is State of Paradise, a standalone novel published in 2024. This novel continues her exploration of complex characters and evocative settings. Prior to this, she published the short story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories in 2020 and the novel The Third Hotel in 2018. State of Paradise is her latest contribution to her body of work.
Laura Van Den Berg writes literary fiction, primarily focusing on short story collections and standalone novels. Her work often delves into themes of identity, memory, desire, and the uncanny, frequently employing surreal or fantastical elements within realistic frameworks. Her narratives are characterized by intricate prose and a deep exploration of her characters' inner lives and perceptions of the world around them.
Anthony Doerr
Coming soon
Rachel Khong
Coming soon
Jami Attenberg
Coming soon
We verified the reading order for Laura Van Den Berg's books by cross-referencing official publication dates, ISBN databases, and publisher catalogs.
Last verified: July 2026
Shelf & Shadows. (…). “Laura Van Den Berg Books in Order.” Retrieved …, from https://www.shelfandshadows.com/authors/laura-van-den-berg