FINALIST, 2025 PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION

WASHINGTON POST’S "50 NOTABLE WORKS OF FICTION" LIST FOR 2024

Stacey Levine's debut collection My Horse and Other Stories established her as a writer in the tradition of Jane Bowles and Franz Kafka, conflating the literal and the dream-like.

In the 90’s & early 2000s, Levine's innovative practice presaged today’s interest in fabulism. Her razor-precise language and characters, according to Pedro Ponce in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, lie “between parody and deconstruction’ yet are “deadly serious about the worlds they reinvent—and the conventional realism that purports to mirror our world.”

Levine’s Mice 1961 recounts a pivotal day in the fraught relationship between a teen girl with albinism and her older sister, seen through the eyes of their obsessively observant domestic helper. Set in Miami at the peak of Cold War hysteria, the novel is a powerful meditation on belonging and separateness, conformity and otherness.

“Levine is a gifted performance artist of literary fiction, part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower.” —The Washington Post: 50 Notable Works of Fiction 2024

“As the novel turns from the tragic circumstances of its core trio, Levine, in full display of her comedic powers, unfurls a tapestry of human stupidity worthy of Bouvard and Pécuchet.” —Alvin Lu, 3 A.M. Magazine

“This novel is as enchanting—and as excitingly original, as tunefully phrased, and as discomposingly hilarious—as anything I can ever hope to read. Few writers are ever this alive to language and this tender toward the lot of the vividly different among us. I am in awe.” —Garielle Lutz

Stacey Levine interviewed on Beyond the Zero podcast