Published in 2020
144 pages
3 hours and 45 minutes
Lara Ehrlich is the author of the short-story collection Animal Wife, which won the Red Hen Fiction Award. Her writing has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Massachusetts Review, and The Columbia Review, among others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Boston University, she lives with her husband and daughter in Boston.
What is this book about?
“In villages where women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks”, said Italo Calvino of the way imagination bridges the gap between everyday existence and an idealized alternative.
The 15 stories of Animal Wife are each about girls and women who cross this threshold seeking liberation from family responsibilities, from societal expectations, from their own minds.
A girl born with feathers undertakes a quest for the mother who abandoned her. An indecisive woman drinks Foresight, only to become stymied by the futures branching before her. A proofreader cultivates a cage-fighting alter ego. A woman becomes psychologically trapped in her car. A girl acts on her desire for a childhood friend as a monster draws closer to shore. A widow invites a bear to hibernate in her den.
