Frances Johnson doesn’t want to attend the town dance. But there is pressure. The people of Munson, her small Florida town, make their needs known: Ray, her boyfriend who is “overfocused on world history”; Mal, the horsey, earnest, fry cook at Mal’s Pico Diner, who offers her his cabin;Palmer, the town doctor who can find no cure for the mysterious scar Frances bears; her mother, speaking to her through “the mechanical screeching” of Munson’s patched telephone lines. Nearby, a volcano the townspeople call “Sharla” spews lava and stones, lighting the night sky with its portentous burning. At once measured and suspenseful, Frances Johnson is a comedy of manners in the tradition of Jane Bowles.

Frances Johnson: A Novel

Romance

Levine, Stacey

Contemporary

Clear Cut Pr Llc

"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
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.
Stacey Levine is the author of My Horse and Other Stories (PEN/West Fiction Award, 1994) and the novels Dra— and Frances Johnson (finalist, Washington State Book Award, 2005).

The Girl With Brown Fur: Tales & Stories

Literature & Fiction

Starcherone Books

Thirty-six of the most interesting writers in the Pacific Northwest came together for a week-long marathon of writing live on stage. The result? Hotel Angeline, a truly inventive novel that surprises at every turn of the page. Something is amiss at the Hotel Angeline, a rickety former mortuary perched atop Capitol Hill in rain-soaked Seattle. Fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin is fixing the plumbing, the tea, and all the problems of the world, it seems, in her landlady mother’s absence.The quirky tenants—a hilarious mix of misfits and rabble-rousers from days gone by—rely on Alexis all the more when they discover a plot to sell the Hotel. Can Alexis save their home? Find her real father? Deal with her surrogate dad’s dicey past? Find true love? Perhaps only their feisty pet crow, Habib, truly knows. Provoking interesting questions about the creative process, this novel is by turns funny, scary, witty, suspenseful, beautiful, thrilling, and unexpected.

Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices

Welch, Craig

WIGGS, SUSAN

Bauermeister, Erica

Alcalá, Kathleen

Emerson, Kevin

Kallos, Stephanie

Dugoni, Robert

QUINN, JULIA

Shortridge, Jennie

Amster-Burton, Matthew

Ford, Clyde W.

Headley, Maria Dahvana

Stein, Garth

Caletti, Deb

Ford, Jamie

McCue, Frances

SUNDARESAN, INDU

Cassella, Carol

Rawles, Nancy

O'Brien, Kevin

Dietrich, William

Boling, Dave

Stump, Greg

Guterson, Mary

Beaudoin, Sean

Middleton, Jarret

Finneyfrock, Karen

Mountford, Peter

Skoog, Ed

Bakke, Kit

Lasky, David

Hein, Teri

Selfors,Suzanne

George,Elizabeth

Larson, Erik.

Literary

Open Road Media

Stacey Levine's My Horse, her first collection of short tales, reads with such precisely turned sentences that it seems to have been written with a scalpel.The stories of My Horse range from otherworldly, opaque portraits to claustrophobic domestic studies. In the title story, the narrator has a small pet horse, whose loose skin gradually develops scabby rings and sores. With painful psycho-logic the story recounts the narrator's various and changing attitudes toward the pet, as the physical deterioration of the animal is reflected in the owner's shift from love to abuse. In "The Hump," a woman finds a small growth on her body, which, while she waits for a doctor's appointment, quickly grows into a large hump that affects her entire system and her perceptions of reality. In "Cakes," the narrator buys several cakes with the intention of eating them to become very "Full." But the sudden appearance of a dog and cat at the window so terribly upsets her that she cannot eat the cakes; as the animals remain at her window for days, she postpones her enjoyment, becoming in the end "quite ill." In story after story Levine returns to the impermeability of experience, of not knowing even our own bodies with any certainty. A blackened tooth or a Siamese twin become haunting metaphors for the unreasonable, unfathomable burden of existence that she conveys in wickedly enthralling prose.

My Horse and Other Stories (New American Fiction)

United States

Sun & Moon Press

Dra-, Levine's first long fictional work, takes the reader into the comic, yet dystopic world of the title character, who inhabits a drab and dreary world of utter dread. The work begins with her visit to an employment agency which punishes the terrified woman for being unable to chose between potential jobs, culminating in a terrible vision of rage and torture which the all-controlling Administrator proclaims is merely a self-tyranny. Levine's new work explores, through a Kafka-like world, how the meek and sane are made mad in a society that demands choices that only lead to less and less individual choice and control. Levine's characters may have difficulty functioning in the so-called "normal" world, but in her exploration of that world we recognize that the terror they feel is justified as we witness, with increasing horror, the insanity of the world we ourselves inhabit.

Dra- (New American Fiction)

In The Girl With Brown Fur Stacey Levine has invented stories that will thrill readers of literary fiction who hunger for an innovative American voice. No two of these fictions are alike, and yet in each, an otherworldly beauty shines through as Levine probes the basic human desire for connection. In The Cats,” Brook has her beloved cat  and sole companion  Sis cloned, in order to avoid being alone. In The World of Barry” a wife lauds the comforts that come from being married to a seemingly ordinary man named Barry. In Lax Forb,” a successful young businessman feels his body evaporating while in a taxi on his way from Cincinnati to Akron. And in The Wolf,” a neurologist escapes the pressures of the city and his marriage for the woods, only to encounter a smiling wolf amongst the trees.Rooted in the quotidian and often mundane details of everyday life, these stories turn our expectations upside down. Magical, funny, and often darkly poetic, these are modern tales that mine the borders between dreams and conscious life, inviting us on a voyage through places and times at once deeply familiar and wondrously strange.

The Girl With Brown Fur: Tales and Stories

Macadam Cage Pub

From the get-go, it's clear that something strange is afoot in Munson, the fictional Florida hamlet where Stacey Levine's new novel, Frances Johnson, takes place. A volcano seethes on the outskirts of town, strange animals skitter in the shadows, and a dense brown fog has settled overhead. Pets and people vanish. Unfurling over a period of days leading up to the town's annual dance, the story follows 38-year-old 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. Though the novel hinges on a familiar plot point will Frances remain in Munson, or escape to the world at large? it's the only trace of convention to be found in this hypnotic book, which transforms its setting into a tableau of exotic menace.

Frances Johnson

Verse Chorus Press

Mice 1961

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