What Wolves Know [hc]

Kit Reed writes fresh, exciting stories ripped straight out of tomorrow's headlines.    A boy raised by wolves, the dog that knows exactly who is next to die, a monkey that writes bestsellers-- no, Kit Reed's new collection is by no means the next Animal Planet. What Wolves Know also contains "Doing the Butterfly," in which a convict with murder in his heart sets out to deceive the newest Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine, and the sparkling story "Special," about a nature writer named Ashley Famous, who overturns local society in a small town on the Hudson. In "The Chaise," a university community stands by while the narrator grapples with a despicable piece of furniture, and baffled parents in "Denny" arm themselves, fearing that their son, the title character, "may go all Columbine on us."  Sharp, often funny, Reed's stories have been called, variously, "pure dry ice" and "less fantastic than visionary" by The New York Times Book Review," which describes one of the stories in her collection, Thief of Lives as "a masterpiece of its kind." In his "Afterword: What She Thought She Was Doing," Joseph Reed of Wesleyan University analyzes her work, excerpting reviews from distinguished critics in both the U.S. and the U.K.