"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"

"I laughed aloud many times. It was a startled, delighted laughter produced not by commonplace tricks of humor but something singular to Levine's writing: a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I've never seen anywhere else . . . Levine is a gifted performance artist of literary fiction -- part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower."--Lydia Millet "Washington Post"

"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.--Garielle Lutz "Bookforum"

Publisher: Verse Chorus Press

Pub date: 2024-03-19

Length: 260 pages