“should be required reading” - the L.A. times
WINNER OF THE 2024 oregon book award; semifinalist for the pacific northwest book award
recommended by Harpers bazaar, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Salon, TIME, Vulture, Goodreads, The Financial Times, Bustle, The Star Tribune, Reader’s Digest, Debutiful, Powells, etc
“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 Berry’s 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-7’s 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.
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 we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.
Published in 2023 by Flatiron Books (U.S. / Canada) and Canongate (U.K. + Commonwealth)
Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize:
“I devoured every startling, lyrical, haunting page of wolfish. a stunning achievement, It left me feeling like one of the pack.”
Marc Bekoff, PhD, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals:
“[a] beautifully written and passionate book that deserves wide, global attention.”
V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage, longlisted for the Women’s Prize:
“a marvel: a beautiful piece of work as wide-ranging as it is precise….you won’t want to miss this.”
Lyz Lenz, author of God Land:
“I can't stop talking about Wolfish...a triumph of a debut.”
Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning:
“an exhilarating book—intricate, thoughtful, and thick with connections.”
About Erica
Erica Berry is a writer and teacher based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her essays appear in The Guardian, Wired, Outside, Catapult, The Yale Review, Literary Hub, Gulf Coast, The New York Times Magazine, Colorado Review, The Atlantic, Guernica, and others. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize and Kurt Brown Prize in Nonfiction, she has received grants and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Tin House.
A teacher of writing workshops at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, New York Times Student Journeys, and Oxford Academia, she was the 2019-2020 National Writers’ Series Writer-in-Residence in Traverse City, Michigan. She graduated from Bowdoin College in 2014, and received her MFA from the University of Minnesota as a College of Liberal Arts Fellow in 2018. She is currently a Writer-in-the-Schools with Literary Arts in Portland.
Photo: Andrea Lonas, 2022