Stacey Levine's debut collection My Horse and Other Stories established her as a writer in the tradition of authors such as Jane Bowles and Franz Kafka, conflating the literal and the dream-like: uncanny sights and objects are real and imagined at once. In the 90’s & early 2000s, Levine's innovative practice presaged today’s interest in fabulism. Her razor-precise language and her characters, according to Pedro Ponce in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, lie “somewhere between between parody and deconstruction’ and are “deadly serious about the world they reinvent and the standard realism that purports to mirror this world.”
Levine’s new novel 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 housekeeper. Set in southern Florida at the peak of Cold War hysteria, this 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.” —50 Notable Works of Fiction 2024 list, The Washington Post
“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
“Taking a cue from Madame Bovary’s opening sentence, Levine brings the narrator Girtle—complete with stirring backstory—into the book itself while at the same time keeping her hidden behind sofas, trees, and poles, in a way that is both realist and metafictional.”
—Alvin Lu, 3 A.M. Magazine
“One of the most interesting writers working in America today, startling and idiosyncratic in the best sense.”
—Stephen Beachy,
San Francisco Bay Guardian
“…sentences of throat-clutching beauty…”
—Bookforum
“The deadpan, existential Frances Johnson left me with a feeling of suspension in zero gravity.”
— Lydia Millet, O Magazine.
