Stacey Levine

Last updated
Stacey Levine
Stacey Levine 2024 (cropped).jpg
Born St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Occupation
  • novelist
  • short story author
  • journalist
  • college writing instructor
Alma mater University of Missouri
University of Washington
Notable awards Stranger Genius Award
PEN Literary Award for Fiction
Website
www.staceylevine.com

Stacey Levine is an American novelist, short story author, and journalist. She has been called "one of the most interesting writers working in America today," [1] "a gifted performance artist of literary fiction, part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower," [2] and her writing has been described as "unlike anything else . . . vivid and preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition." [3] Reviewing her 2011 story collection The Girl with Brown Fur, Donna Seaman summed up Levine's writing thus:

Contents

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. [4]

Biography

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Levine attended the University of Missouri journalism school and the University of Washington. She has published three novels and two story collections, and her stories and criticism have appeared in numerous journals, including Fence , The Iowa Review , Tin House , Bookforum , The Brooklyn Rail , Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors , The Seattle Times , The Stranger , and YETI. She lives in Seattle, where she teaches at Seattle Central College.

Career

Levine’s debut story collection, ‘’My Horse and Other Stories,’’ was published in 1993 by Sun & Moon Press, and won the 1994 PEN Literary Award for Fiction. [5] “Levine’s prose is compelling and intriguing and risky,” wrote the Review of Contemporary Fiction , [6] while Exquisite Corpse noted: “Because something very similar to this once happened to you, you should read this book. There is a secret for your eyes only inside.’’ [7]

Levine’s first novel, Dra— (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), “turns that most banal of activities, the search for a job, into a nightmarish pilgrimage of regression and lost selfhood.” It was praised as “both haunting and laugh-out-loud funny,” for its "beautiful, arresting prose," and for the author’s ability to “put the emotional violence of human relations under a high‑power microscope.” [8] Publishers Weekly claimed it combined “the dreamlike pace of Alice in Wonderland , the darkly comic tones of a Kafka novel, and a landscape reminiscent of 1984.” [9]

Frances Johnson, Levine’s second novel (Clear Cut Press, 2005), is set in Munson, a fictional Florida hamlet where “a volcano seethes on the outskirts of town, strange animals skitter in the shadows, and a dense brown fog has settled overhead. . . . The story follows Frances’s mounting restlessness, as she must decide whether to take control of her life or cede it to the murky future the community has designated for her.” [10] The Believer described the novel as “a comedy of manners,” and discerned “an inkling of Austen in Levine’s delicate and deadpan assault on our culture’s heterosexist, heterogeneous dictates. But the feel of the novel is more fanciful than programmatic," reviewer Jason McBride noted. "Each sentence operates in the same manner as the overarching narrative: shifting shape, defying expectation.” [11]

A second story collection, The Girl with Brown Fur: Tales & Stories, was published in 2011 by Starcherone Books. In the Los Angeles Review of Books , reviewer Stephanie Barbe Hammer praised its “abundance of beautiful strangeness” and noted its formal range, from fairytale to metafiction to “prose-poem sketches,” observing that “the narrative language throughout . . . is crystalline and intensely elegant, often at comic odds with the terse speech of the characters themselves.” [12] Couched within Levine’s “strange fables,” wrote Kristy Eldredge, 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.” [13]

Reviewing Levine’s third novel, Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press, 2024), in the Washington Post, Lydia Millet highlighted “something singular to Levine’s writing: a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I’ve never seen anywhere else” that elicited from her “a startled, delighted laughter.” [14] Alvin Lu called it “a subtly observed novel of manners, a cross between Jane Bowles and Jane Austen” couched in “remarkable language,” [15] while Garielle Lutz has stated that “Mice 1961 is as enchanting a novel—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.” [16]

Levine has collaborated with graphic novelist David Lasky on comics projects, and with illustrator Chuk Baldock, with whom she published the chapbook JFK vs. Predator in 2023. In addition she has written a radio play, The Post Office (1996), with music composed by Lori Goldston, [17] and a one-act play, Susan Moneymaker, Large and Small, which was published as a chapbook by the Brooklyn-based Belladonna Series and produced in Seattle. She also wrote the libretto for a puppet opera, The Wreck of the St. Nikolai, with music by Lori Goldston (cello) and Kyle Hanson (accordion) and mis-en-scene by Eve Cohen and Curtis Taylor, [18] which was staged in Seattle by On the Boards in 2006. [19]

Awards and recognition

Levine received a Stranger Genius Award for Literature in 2009, [20] and two of her books have been finalists for the Washington State Book Award in Fiction. She has received a PEN Literary Award for Fiction [21] and various writing grants and fellowships.

Works

Novels

Story collections

Chapbooks

Spoken Word

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References

  1. ↑ Beachy, Stephen (September 28, 2005). "Leaving Munson (review of Frances Johnson)". San Francisco Bay Guardian . Retrieved November 25, 2024.
  2. ↑ Millet, Lydia (April 15, 2024). "'Mice 1961' is set in 1961 but isn't about rodents". Washington Post. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  3. ↑ Kelly Link on Mice 1961, cited on Amazon detail page. Retrieved November 24, 2024.
  4. ↑ Seaman, Donna (June 2009). "The Girl with Brown Fur". Bookforum. 16 (2). Retrieved November 25, 2024.
  5. ↑ 1994 PEN Literary Awards, press release, 13 May 1994, accessed 25 Nov 2024.
  6. ↑ Weaser, Angela (Spring 1994). "My Horse and Other Stories". Review of Contemporary Fiction. 14 (1): 221–222. Retrieved November 25, 2024.
  7. ↑ Cited on back cover of Dra— (Sun & Moon Press, 1997).
  8. ↑ Eldredge, Kristy (Spring 1999). "Dra—". Third Coast (8). Retrieved November 25, 2024.
  9. ↑ "Dra—". Publishers Weekly. July 31, 1997. Retrieved November 25, 2024.
  10. ↑ McCloskey, Caroline (December 5, 2005). "Frances Johnson". TimeOut New York (531)..
  11. ↑ McBride, Jason (March 1, 2006). "A Review of: Frances Johnson by Stacey Levine—". The Believer (32). Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  12. ↑ Hammer, Stephanie Barbe (Fall 2012). "The Girl with Brown Fur". Los Angeles Review of Books (12). Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  13. ↑ Eldredge, Kristy (May 13, 2011). "The Girl with Brown Fur by Stacey Levine". HTMLGiant. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  14. ↑ Millet, Lydia (April 15, 2024). "'Mice 1961' is set in 1961 but isn't about rodents". Washington Post. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  15. ↑ Lu, Alvin (July 29, 2024). "Mice 1961 & Prison Mars". 3:AM Magazine. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  16. ↑ Garielle Lutz, cited on back cover of Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press, 2024)
  17. ↑ "Stacey Levine and Lori Goldston, The Post Office". podtail.com (Podcast). Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  18. ↑ [https://vodvil.org/wreck-of-the-st-nickolai The Wreck of the St. Nikolai (an opera for objects)
  19. ↑ Borchert, Gavin (October 9, 2006). "The Wreck of the St. Nikolai". Seattle Weekly. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  20. ↑ Constant, Paul (September 30, 2009). "Stacey Levine Is the Proud Owner of a Sheet Cake". The Stranger. Seattle. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  21. ↑ Herzog, Mary Susan (June 11, 1996). "Taking PEN in Hand". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 26, 2024.
  22. ↑ Dra—, detail page, Verse Chorus Press, Retrieved November 24, 2024.
  23. ↑ Frances Johnson, detail page, Verse Chorus Press, Retrieved November 24, 2024.
  24. ↑ Mice 1961, detail page, Verse chorus Press, Retrieved November 24, 2024.
  25. ↑ Susan Moneymaker, Large and Small, Belladonna Chapbook Series, No. 109, Retrieved November 24, 2024.
  26. ↑ JFK vs. Predator, New Pacific Press Chapbook Series #3, Retrieved November 24, 2024.
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