"In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes," it said on the bloated cover.
In other words, to paraphrase a Native American teaching, a wolf of love and a wolf of hate live in the heart of every person.
Not everybody will understand quite how a picture of a wolf with a glass of red wine on its back chimes with raw 4am post-DJ stint snaps and Soviet era tracksuit bottoms.
For the wolf of a writer, the family is a crowd of sitting ducks.
Made with formalist precision in every way, this story about a lone wolf of a boy being bullied at school evolves into a devastating dissection of crime and punishment, alienation, power and our complex relationship with animals.
As befits all these qualities, "Away" has the uncommonly beautiful cover image (from a painting by Sherrie Wolf) of a still-life fruit bowl juxtaposed upon a broad vista of Yosemite Valley.
It was just a painting of a wolf on a door, and not even a particularly good one at that.
One has the face of a wolf, another a lion, etc.
It is no accident that almost every man she meets gazes at her with the slightly widened eyes of a wolf from a Tex Avery cartoon.
We headed downstream again and saw some river otters, a wolf and a flock of arctic terns, fresh in from their 9,000-mile 9,000-milefromigrationnd Argentina.
