Wolf

by Douglas A. Martin

Overview

Begun as a response to a front page photograph illustrating a tragedy that the media quickly sensationalized in the early 2000’s, Wolf tells the composite truth of two brothers, a family friend, a father, and a murder. Skeptical of news cycles and the way trials become page-turners, this book forgoes the standards of true crime: quick conclusions and moralistic underpinnings. Instead, motivated by an attempt to extend empathy, its reconstruction unfolds in tones of witness and meditation. What results is a story about the extremities to which deeply unchecked abuse and ongoing trauma can push a family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643620220
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia, Douglas A. Martin moved to New York at 25 and now resides in Brooklyn. Douglas’s writing spans fiction and nonfiction, traversing poetry and prose. Martin's works have been translated into Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. Past books include: Once You Go Back (Lambda Award nomination in the Gay Memoir/Biography category), Branwell (Ferro-Grumley Award finalist), a book of stories, and volumes of poetry. An early autofiction, Outline of My Lover, was named an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part by the Forsythe Company for their ballet and live film “Kammer/Kammer.” Publications with Nightboat Books include a book-length essay and lyric study, Acker, and the triptych of novellas, Your Body Figured.

Editorial Reviews

03/09/2020

In this disorienting yet arresting novella, Martin (Acker) exhumes a nearly 20-year-old case in which two preteen brothers murdered their sleeping father with a baseball bat in Florida. Martin’s omniscient narrator shifts between different points of view and time frames to explore the father’s self-justification for his abusive treatment and scenes of the unnamed brothers’ trial. The boys, who had been in and out of foster homes before the killing, detail their father’s psychological abuse, including being subjected to “interrogations” and locked in a cramped room in the house, where “a face feels crushed in.” As the boys chafe against their father’s discipline, they spend more time with the father’s friend, who just might be a convicted pedophile. After the man tells the boys they could all be friends, the boys see a way out and begin plotting their father’s murder. The who, what, where, when, and why of the case gradually come to light, but Martin is more concerned with psychological impressionism than journalistic clarity. Events are described by the narrator with an eerie vagueness that dissipates only with the brutal slaying: “In all actuality it only takes about five minutes to do dying.” Martin subjects language to similar torsions, which can occasionally frustrate or baffle, throughout the somber tale’s unwinding. This heartbreaking story of patricide will move readers with its startling notes of empathy. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"This heartbreaking story of patricide will move readers with its startling notes of empathy."—Publishers Weekly

"Employing muscular, wide-open prose and deep, dark empathy, Martin succeeds in doing this exactly here: compels us to contend with an everything. Wolf works by struggle and resistance."—Tom DeBeauchamp, Big Other

"The novel is based on a true crime, but the recreation of evidence into an easily digestible narrative is resisted. Instead, the writer pushes poetic prose to new heights while producing an attuned sense of empathy for characters in unthinkable circumstances."—Zachary Ginsburg, The Adroit Journal

"I’m realizing how much I usually depend on instruction to understand and name suffering. Wolf asks us to do this work on our own."—Spencer Quong, The Paris Review

"Wolf utterly blew me away. It’s a novel told in poetic, yet conversational vignettes, that focuses on gender, masculinity, boyhood, and home. What is a home and how do we create safe homes for ourselves? And more so, how do we become our true selves, and not the selves society wants us to be—and falsely constructs? These are the questions the novel asks, as it tells the story of a family (specifically of a father and two brothers) and a murder—and how we live in a world of violence."—Joanna C. Valente, Luna Luna Magazine

"Wolf is a horror story, a love story, story of survival, of parenting and of coming of age. It manages to be so many contradictory things by a-newly creating the English language—by making a brand new English that is both alienating and intimate. It is a marvel."—Tiphanie Yanique

"I love this strange, stunning novel, thrilling and so full of yearning and danger. Wolf puts words together in beautiful and ingenious ways that left me envious and breathless."—John McManus

"An acutely mysterious and unsettling novel, in which Douglas A. Martin has managed to make the disorientation of trauma into its own form. I felt the ghost of Faulkner in its pages, and the ghost of the family rise up."—Amina Cain

"Like the best of poetry, Wolf pulls off the impossible, again and again. We don’t so much 'read' this work as inhabit the interstices between each word and the next. Only a poet could write a novel so terrifying, riveting, unpredictable and gorgeous. More than this, Douglas A. Martin brilliantly injects the world of this novel with eros and the demand for a horizon of repair from trauma."—Jordy Rosenberg

“There is a reverence in Douglas Martin's writing composed of equal parts language and love.”—Dale Peck

From the Publisher