The Girl with Brown Fur: Tales & Stories
$20

In her new collection, the first since her PEN-West Award-winning MY HORSE AND OTHER STORIES, Stacey Levine gives us twenty-eight new, feral, untamable stories, in myriad modes, from laugh-out-loud funny, to Kafka-nightmarish, lyrical, elegiac, and philosophical. Rooted in the quotidian and often mundane details of everyday life, these stories turn our expectations upside down. Levine, the author of, most recently, the novel FRANCES JOHNSON, again shows why many consider her a genius of contemporary fiction.

"One of the most interesting writers working in America today, startling and idiosyncratic in the best sense." Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

"It is kind of a shame that Stacey Levine's stories have to be published in the form of a book. It's not that they should appear in e-books or anything so mundane as that. Rather, I wish it were somehow possible to hire elfin booksellers to sneak into your home and hide Levine's stories in odd places—inside a cereal box, tucked into a pair of swimming trunks, taped to the back of the oven — so that you could discover them at random and, perhaps, inopportune times. Levine's stories are rare and mysterious things, and confronting them in a book makes them feel less wondrous somehow." Paul Constant, The Stranger

"Stacey Levine ignores lyricism as an evolutionary dead end. Life is fractious and dire, her prose style says; let fiction serve as razor and torch. It's not that Levine isn't funny or that she doesn't forge phrases and sentences of throat-clutching beauty. It's just that her effort to dissect humankind's propensity for neuroses, fallacies, and other inanities requires measured drollery and surgical concision." Donna Seaman, Bookforum

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. Like all good vacations, it's easy to move from weddings to wolves to sausages so quickly that all significance is lost, coalescing into one massive beast in your tinny mind—all because you're in rush. Slow down. Make soup. Kidnap sal bugs. Each tale requires its own moment. Alice Blue Review