Planting Wolves by Neda Disney—Available Now!

"An experimental debut novel-in-stories about artists wrestling with addiction and sexual frustration in Los Angeles. A surreal and darkly funny set of tales of West Coast strangers."

"A collection of thought-provoking stories of human connection."

"This book will feed your voyeuristic urges as you look deeply through the eyes of each character. Brilliantly written."

"Like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon but in a literary way. Six interconnected stories of unhappy characters make up Neda Disney's Planting Wolves. The narratives all worked well individually and together they add up to a pleasing novel."

"Planting Wolves is a beautifully written masterpiece. A wonderful point-of-view story that comes full circle. Disney captures the lives of six intricate characters whose lives are so magnificently intertwined it will leave you wanting more."

"With unhappiness as its central theme, Planting Wolves is a wild read that will leave you searching for clues to who the characters really are."

"Planting Wolves is a crazy quilt of characters and stories, exactly how and why they are stitched together in the way they are is revealed in delightful and magical ways. This is a profound, even masterful debut novel. I highly recommend it, and eagerly await Ms. Disney’s follow up."

"There's a tremendous intensity in these stories, and the author's visual-arts and entertainment-industry background bubble under the surface like the La Brea Tar Pits. Five stars."

"Planting Wolves is about and for the sad and misunderstood, the addicted and the recovering, the has-been and the wannabe. A book—novel or story collection—that demands a lot of its reader. You must accept the world as is, full of self-absorbed, at times nasty characters working and living in Los Angeles and New York. Artsy types clashing with more practical ones. Wives, husbands, imaginary lovers. Unexplainable and weirdly magical bodily changes. Serious topics interspersed with funny scenes. Religious metaphors and personifications of wolves abound. The language mixes the elevated and literary with the profane and funny. A unique novel of the LA art and film scene."

"I only have one word for the book...'wow'"

"Six inhabitants of the city of Los Angeles star each one their own episode. On the surface, their lives seem to have nothing in common; an average pedestrian could imagine that these peoplo fit right into the great machinery of society. In the background, their stories draw an approximate portrait of the great emptiness and the yearning for connection of millions of people who hardly survive their loneliness, submerged in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. A depressed writer becomes obsessed with the idea of identifying his mother from an isolated memory of his childhood. A woman with a neurodegenerative disease returns to the time when she expected three things: a son, an absent husband and a future that would hardly fill her heart. A contractor to whom the world does not pay much attention seems to have been marked by God to become his eyes and ears on earth. An AA sponsor seeks in others the reflection of the one who, impotently, she brought down and lost in addiction. An addict talks to his therapy partners how the confession of his addiction took everything away, even the forgiveness from the one he loved. An arrogant and manipulative girl goes out of her way to live her dreams of greatness and fill her soul with luxury, until a heavy weight problem leads her to discover peace in a temporary relief that could also become her addiction. I think that this book, which can be read as a whole or in pauses, as a series of short films or fictions, is the result of an intense exercise in anthropological observation. The feelings and the introspection, universal and totally relatable, dictate the rhythm of a prose that's been developed without haste but that advances unstoppably as an avalanche. The great events serve as breakwaters, sometimes barely containing and sometimes exceeded, between reflections, memories and hopes. I loved the way that introspection, the depth and the concern for the human condition are evident without ever affecting the rhythm of the stories. In this sense, it could be said that fiction involves the internal and emotional history of each protagonist. This is an absolutely recommended book!"

"Planting Wolves, by Neda Disney, is a collection of linked short stories. “Planting wolves” refers to releasing small groups of wolves to help reignite the local wolf population or reintroduce wolves to a new area. This is directly discussed at one point, recounting how a few pairs of wolves were released in an environment with deer, in the hopes that they’d adapt and develop a new pack, but the wolves failed to thrive and even turned on each other. Did the wolves have trouble adjusting to strange surroundings? Were the deer too clever for prey? What unseen elements made it impossible to thrive? These themes of survival in harsh climates and of the conflict between wildness and civil society are constantly at play in these short stories. In bookblogger and MFA circles, we often talk about whether characters need to be likeable for the book to readable. Here, the author introduces such a string of unpleasant people, sometimes completely lacking in insight or self-awareness. In one story, a sex addict blames his ex for leaving and taking all her things, after all, he did all the hard emotional work of telling her that he has a problem and he’s been constantly cheating on her. In another, a rage-fueled wardrobe manager blames everyone she encounters for her unhappiness. And a husband is shocked to his core to discover his wife has an inner life and personal dreams. None of these characters were anyone I wanted to be friends with (a certain few would be absolute nightmare coworkers!), but I loved seeing inside their minds and lives. Most of this is realistic fiction, but there are hints of magical realism. These are cleverly done, so that by the time a production assistant faces his stigmata, real life has already been shown to be completely bizarre and surreal anyway."

"Her writing is riveting. Five stars doesn't it due it justice, as anyone gets five stars here. If you'd give Chekhov and Hemingway, 5 stars, and Amis, and Moore and Plath 5 stars,..it makes sense to give her 5 stars for, I believe, her first novel. She has an economy of words, and meaning I can only describe as masculine and, at times, a bit terrifying, as if you don't know what she might notice about the reader's foibles within one of her stark observations of even a passerby. I don't tend to read for plot, but for how the language and phrasing make me giggle inside with awe or surprise. Her narration has an unmistakable cosmopolitan arrogance of perception, seeing into her characters with such clarity, it makes, me the reader feel unusually gifted in that art as well. When I write reviews I try to get out of my way and let the actual text show what I mean with an example if I can find one. Of course out of context, it's hard to convey what it's like running into the phrase with full momentum, but I believe her confidence and flow comes across here. "The writer found himself silently apologizing for what he feared would happen to her in her life (referring to the positive, gushing, writerly MFA aide the large bookstore had offered him on this leg of his book tour). As they walked down to catch a cab to the book signing, he found himself apologizing for the man she would end up with, the pretentious, lazy grad student with floppy hair who would trap her soft farm body in the city and who would hypnotize her with talk of John Updike and Normal Mailer until her youth was completely gone." I could picture her and her entire future, her children, in the 30 or so words used to describe her. If you're up for a read which doesn't hold your hand for a second, but never leaves your psyche, this is a rare find, that I hope is followed by others."