The Isle of Youth: Stories

"[Laura van den Berg is] a master of the short story form. Hers are deliciously unnerving, moving, and monstrous tales.” —Karen Russell, author of Orange World and other stories

"A smart, fun, noir-y treasure map . . . Van den Berg somehow packs a duffel bag of plot into carry-on-size stories. She also has the right kind of range: from brutal to moving to funny, South America to Paris to Antarctica, really great to freaking outstanding.” —Kathryn Schulz, New York

The surreal, compulsively readable collection that established Laura van den Berg as a singular stylist, reissued for its tenth anniversary.

The Isle of Youth, Laura van den Berg’s breakout second story collection, explores the lives of women who are mired in secrecy and deception. Ranging from the inscrutability of a marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, these stories are linked by mystery and by women who are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless—who do what it takes to survive.

The characters in van den Berg’s stories are lost in the mysteries of the self and the world at large, an experience that feels at once entirely singular and utterly familiar. Van den Berg writes with an elegant urgency and hypnotic rhythm, revealing the inner lives of marginalized young women grappling with the choices they’ve made and searching for the clues that will unlock their lives. The book that established the career of one of our most celebrated stylists, reissued now for its tenth anniversary, The Isle of Youth is both magical and mystical, and a landmark collection in contemporary fiction.