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," "a gifted performance artist of literary fiction, part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower," and her writing has been described as "unlike anything else . . . vivid and preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition." Reviewing her 2011 story collection The Girl with Brown Fur, Donna Seaman summed up Levine's writing thus:<br>
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.
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. âÂÂLevine's prose is compelling and intriguing and risky,â wrote the Review of Contemporary Fiction, 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."
Levine's first novel, Draâ (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), âÂÂturns that most banal of activities, the search for a job, into a nightmarish pilgrimage of regression and lost selfhood.â It was praised as âÂÂboth haunting and laugh-out-loud funny,â for its "beautiful, arresting prose," and for the author's ability to âÂÂput the emotional violence of human relations under a highâÂÂpower microscope.â Publishers Weekly claimed it combined âÂÂthe dreamlike pace of Alice in Wonderland, the darkly comic tones of a Kafka novel, and a landscape reminiscent of 1984.âÂÂ
Frances Johnson, Levine's second novel (Clear Cut Press, 2005), is set in Munson, a fictional Florida hamlet where âÂÂa 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.â The Believer described the novel as âÂÂa comedy of manners,â and discerned âÂÂan 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.âÂÂ
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 âÂÂabundance of beautiful strangenessâ and noted its formal range, from fairytale to metafiction to âÂÂprose-poem sketches,â observing that âÂÂthe narrative language throughout . . . is crystalline and intensely elegant, often at comic odds with the terse speech of the characters themselves.â Couched within Levine's âÂÂstrange fables,â wrote Kristy Eldredge, are âÂÂrecognizable 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.âÂÂ
Reviewing Levine's third novel, Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press, 2024), in the Washington Post, Lydia Millet highlighted âÂÂsomething singular to Levine's writing: a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I've never seen anywhere elseâ that elicited from her âÂÂa startled, delighted laughter.â Alvin Lu called it âÂÂa subtly observed novel of manners, a cross between Jane Bowles and Jane Austenâ couched in âÂÂremarkable language,â while Garielle Lutz has stated that âÂÂMice 1961 is as enchanting a novelâÂÂand as excitingly original, as tunefully phrased, and as discomposingly hilariousâÂÂas 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.âÂÂ
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, 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, which was staged in Seattle by On the Boards in 2006.
Levine received a Stranger Genius Award for Literature in 2009, 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 and various writing grants and fellowships.
Her novel Mice 1961 was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.