REVIEWS

The Girl with Brown Fur

“Levine’s work delivers uniquely stirring narrative. It provides us with access to feelings and possibilities we did not know we had.”

— Stephanie Barbe Hammer, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Video Review: The Girl with Brown Fur in Wikiezvid’s “10 Innovative Short Story Collections” - click here for video

“There’s no making nice here, no way of easing into this writer’s sensibility. In The Girl with Brown Fur, Stacey Levine ignores lyricism as an evolutionary dead end.”   
— Donna Seaman, Bookforum

“In ‘And You Are?’, the longest story in this collection, the narrator confides, ‘In 1999, when many people said that a crisis might be, but that it might not be, Janice-Katie took some prescription pills and felt a bit better.’ This is a collection meant to be discovered — found.” 
— Laura Tharp, Bookslut

“Couched within the strange fables in Stacey Levine’s latest story collection The Girl with Brown Fur are recognizable hurts and self-defeating desires. The way she writes about such things is what makes her fiction the elegant, precise, and transcendent wonderland it is.” 
— Kristy Eldredge, HTML Giant

“In the opening story of Stacey Levine’s The Girl with Brown Fur, a family moves to Uppsala—this is a real word and a real place, yet it’s one that sounds strange and slightly fantastic to an Anglophone ear. Suspending her readers between the familiar and the foreign is what Levine does best, and each story in this collection feels like its own fully-realized, self-contained world.”   
— Steve Himmer, Necessary Fiction

“Reading The Girl with Brown Fur: Tales & Stories is like exploring a city not your own in a robot submarine. Prepare for Stacey Levine’s sentences or they will eat you. Take time off work, call in sick, give yourself a week.”  
— Alice Blue Review

Frances Johnson

“Frances Johnson, Stacey Levine’s latest novel, continues to map out the psychic territory of her first novel, DRA—, and her book of stories, My Horse and Other Stories. Levine’s work is, at least technically, ‘surreal,’ but like much of the best writing that maps the borders between dreams and conscious life, its subtle disjunctions create a zone that often feels more real than ‘reality’ itself.”
— Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

“From the get-go, it’s clear that something strange is afoot in Munson, the fictional Florida hamlet where Stacey Levine’s new novel, Frances Johnson, takes place. A volcano seethes on the outskirts of town, strange animals skitter in the shadows, and a dense brown fog has settled overhead.” 
— Caroline McCloskey, Time Out NY

“…unusual but successful decisions at the sentence-level support a naturally absurdist/surrealist worldview.”
—Jeff Vandermeer

“I can't help thinking that many heavily workshopped MFA novels could be this good if their heart and soul were not inevitably excised during said workshopping.”

—Sean Stewart

Dra—

“I finished Dra—, Seattle writer Stacey Levine’s horrifying yet beautifully written first novel, feeling breathless and chilled to the bone. I also was filled with admiration for a writer whose flawless prose, subtle detail, and hints at  further nightmares could take me to a world I so strongly resisted.” 
—Judy Doenges, The Seattle Times 

“I do love a book where the lead character loudly exclaims how she hates being a woman. Levine’s anti-realist settings and description are innovative and intriguing and utterly true to psychological reality.”

— Quartermain Book Notes, Vancouver, B.C.

“Dra—, the nondescript heroine of this grim, hilarious fiction, might have fallen through the same hole as Lewis Carrol’s Alice, only now, 130 years later, there’s no time for frivolity, just the pressing need to get a job.”
—Matthew Stadler, The Stranger

“In her introduction to the latest edition of the collected Jane Bowles, Joy Williams argues that reading Bowles taught her nothing about writing. With all due respect, I’m not sure that I agree with Williams, whose work I adore and which often bears the same reckless beauty and sentence-by-sentence surprise that I find in Bowles. In any case, someone who, it’s safe to say, learned plenty from Bowles is the Seattle-based author Stacey Levine.”
—Jason McBride,  Believer

My Horse and Other Stories

“The 18 stories in this debut collection range from the disquieting to the bizarre to the terrifying. One stands out for having all these qualities. A woman discovers a ``flesh-colored hump'' on her shoulder that cannot be removed. What is frightening is not the plot…but the woman's all-consuming obsession—“It might have been possible that the hump jiggled and swayed somewhat less now than it had when it first appeared, a month before; it seemed harder, and being harder, it also seemed smaller.''

—Publisher’s Weekly

“By way of its grotesquely surreal images and situations, Stacey Levine’s first collection of short tales is an intriguing matter-of-fact study of the impossibility of ‘real’ perception, of a single objective way of viewing the world and the individual’s relation to it. Levine’s self-critiquing narrators take for granted a world in which ‘anything can happen’ —not the conventional ‘anything’ (i.e., winning the lottery, falling in love in a grocery store, being in the ‘right place at the right time’) but the ‘anything’ of the Twilight Zone (without the voice-over narration).”
—Angela Weaser, The Review of Contemporary Fiction