The Girl With Brown Fur

Stacey Levine 

Release Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0984213344 

Price: $20.00

eBook Price: $7.99

DESCRIPTION

In her first short fiction collection since 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, to 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.

REVIEWS

"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
 
"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." —William Gallien, Alice Blue Reviews

"Amid alarming depictions of domestic misery and perversion, strange metamorphoses, and imperiled nature, as well as the occasional triumphant escape or alliance, Levine declares the death of myth and anticipates the collapse of civilization. But for now, she subtly acknowledges that however deluded, poisoned, and impaired we may be, we will continue to tell and cherish tales and stories as we struggle against lies, brutality, and alienation."—Donna Seamen, Bookforum

"The inhabitants of Stacey Levine's stories attempt each of these things and more, with no more success than people who have extramarital affairs or people who buy sports cars. Thankfully, Levine's stories have a refreshing lack of respect for reality." —The Believer

"Levine's crisp stories similarly find excitement and transformation as they chase down their fantastical plots. The Girl with Brown Fur won't be everyone's cup of tea, but the adventurous will enjoy following Levine's breadcrumb trails, even if that means getting a little bit lost." —A.N. Devers, Time Out New York

“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...  [I]t is not because we’ve seen this landscape in other fictions, but maybe in a half-remembered dream.”—Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian