A Wolf by the Ears is a splendid novel [filled with] unforgettable people. Wayne Karlin gives us a universe of well-honed, well-realized characters—Towerhill, Sarai, Jacob, Joseph and others who… offer a new dimension about American slavery and what it did to us. His picture of war time is just as vivid, haunting and unforgettable as the plantation section. He shows us war in language that makes him seem not just a storyteller but a witness. Karlin’s work is inspired, a gift, and a pure treasure.
--Edward P. Jones, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Known World
Here is a complexly imagined record of the catastrophes and dreaming out of which the nation emerges. A dissection of the country within ‘The Country,’ the then within the now. But what makes this work pulse with vitality is Karlin's attention to that which is fleeting--the smallest instant, the slightest flesh. Lush, elemental, seeping with place, this novel is a reckoning, a confrontation, an excavation of a history made of breath and touch.
--Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
For many years, but especially since the publication of his classic memoir, Rumors and Stones, Vietnam veteran writer Wayne Karlin has challenged conventional narratives of war, race, history and memory. He has done it again, brilliantly, with this novel, bound to flip expectations upside down. Karlin chronicles the ordeals of two slaves among thousands in Maryland and Virginia who joined the British side in the forgotten War of 1812 against the American “republic” and its hypocrisies, all for the cause of freedom promised by their monarchist allies and denied by a democracy built on slavery. Karlin makes this profoundly ironic and contradictory history so human and intimate, so tragic and yet redemptive, testimony to his great skill as a storyteller and his experience with the realities of war. As the recipient of the Juniper Prize for this novel, Wayne Karlin should finally receive the credit denied him as a major writer, his due long overdue. We are all the better for it.
--Martín Espada, winner of the National Book Award for Floaters
This is a novel that vividly examines the struggle of enslaved people to find their freedom, dignity and self-worth as our country struggled—as it still does--to define those values in the face of a reality created dependent on chattel slavery and cursed with a legacy of institutionalized racism.
--Michael Glaser, former Poet Laureate of Maryland
This is a novel of tremendous emotional complexity, of cruelty 'grown from the need to see oneself as kind.' The language is lush, and the wound deep and abiding.
--Noy Holland, author of I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like
Batter my heart three-personed God, Donne intones in the best of his Holy Sonnets sequence. So it is in Wayne Karlin’s novel, A Wolf by the Ear, the thrice born status of three new arrivals in early nineteenth America leaves each vulnerable to further rebirth as they are sold on the auction block and renamed. Karlin is bold in his embrace of American slavery, and even more courageous in his writing of the conscience of blacks and whites in charge of the moral fate of the nation at a time of this nation’s greatest frailty. Donne’s vision is moral, that is, concerned with the triple manifestation of the holy trinity (father, son and holy ghost) while Karlin’s secular vision takes on ethics. As a writer Wayne Karlin is adept with the architecture of the novel as a culmination of events driven by memorable characters. In prose that is at once compressed and resonant, his sentences mellifluous, Karlin reminds us of the call of history for fiction intent on tying art to ethics and lasting as art in a history of temporal bodies and systems, though both may behave as if everlasting in the face of art’s grace. Wayne Karlin’s love of justice and the calling of his just art celebrate the ways struggle triumphs in the face of despair. He refracts the past against the present and makes us examine how we live now and ask why the dilemma of this time seems so reminiscent of that past. In A Wolf by the Ear Wayne Karlin writes at the height of his imaginative powers.
--Fred D’Aguiar, Author of Children of Paradise and The Longest Memory