The Shape of Wilderness

A coming-of-age story set in a prophetic American wilderness, by an award-winning playwright.

Twin sisters Miranda and Rose live in a deserted hotel that their dreamer father built to attract a railroad and a city which never came. As their mother chases a delusion of her own, the sisters encounter an itinerant artist and a shady trapper whose impact on their lives proves shattering. With exquisite storytelling and seamless use of magic realism, The Shape of Wilderness follows Miranda and Rose on a journey of carnal and metaphysical love; spiritual and emotional violence; art and materialism; wilderness and civilization; loss and coming-of-age. A map of the mythos of America, a cartography of the human spirit, this stunning novel explores how we shape our destinies and how they shape us.

Publication date: October 1, 1995

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5

Page count: 300 pages

ISBN: 9781566890365

Shelley Berc and her husband, Alejandro Fogel, have been cultural ambassadors for the US State Department’s Arts America Program, lecturing in their artistic fields and teaching workshops in creativity in Hungary, Rumania, Australia, and Italy. Berc was Professor of the International Writing Program and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1985-2000. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and was one of the first women to graduate from Amherst College. Her first novel, The Shape of Wilderness, was praised by the New York Times.

“A vividly imagined parable. . . . A strange and potent book . . . . A fantastical world of unusual sensuality and invention.”

—The New York Times

“[Berc's] first novel is a fluid, often theatrical composition: action flows into dream, objects into symbols, consciousness into trance.”

—Booklist