There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights by Laura van den Berg

Description

These characters know there are whole worlds out there that have never been seen, some as distant as the Amazon rain forest, others as close as a neighbor’s house, the curtains left open. Laura van den Berg helps us discover these worlds, blending the mundane and routine with the strange and unexpected. The search won’t always end with the stories—these restless narrators will always be left with mysteries unsolved, questions unanswered and hidden aches not quite healed—but what they see along the way will be nothing short of marvelous.

“How lucky for the characters in this amazing collection, who are shocked by the mysteries of their strange lives, that Laura van den Berg knows them with such clarity that their stories become, in such a short space, thrilling and resonant. This is a beautiful book, every story speaking to the one that came before it and the one that follows. It will quietly open you up and fill you with light.” -Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and The Family Fang

“Van den Berg’s poetic voice fills the page with these eccentric, funny, heartful yet unsentimental stories about people turned peculiar in their quests for closeness. Fantastic work.” -Deb Olin Unferth, author of Minor Robberies, Vacation, and Revolution

Check out previously published pieces included in this chapbook:
“Parakeets” in Guernica

Review of There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights:
Patrick Trotti at JMWW

Laura van den Berg

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. 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.