Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear [Paperback]

For fans of Helen MacDonaldsH is for Hawkand Mary Roach, Erica BerrysWOLFISHblends science, history, and cultural criticism in a years-long journey to understand our myths about wolves, and track one legendary wolf, OR-7, from the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon

OREGON BOOK AWARD WINNER * Shortlisted for the 2024 Pacific Northwest Book Award*A Most Anticipated Book of 2023:TIME, Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Salon, Bustle,The Rumpus, Financial Times,Reader's Digest, LitHub, Book Riot,Debutiful, and more!

Exhilarating. The Washington Post

Wolfishstarts with a single wolf and spirals through nuanced investigations of fear, gender, violence, and story. A GORGEOUS achievement. Blair Braverman, author ofWelcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.

So begins Erica Berrys kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.

As Erica chronicles her own migrationfrom crying wolf as a child on her grandfathers sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicilyshe searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which w