Dra-

(Paperback, Second Edition)

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Description

Dra-, the incompletely named anti-heroine of this unusual, brilliant novel is trying to get a job. She isn't sure what kind of job or where or what its purpose is; she only knows she has to find one. Dra- wanders the labyrinthine corridors of some vast unamed workplace getting unsolicited advice from characters with names such as Manager, Administrator and Nurse. The quirkiness and clarity of Levine's language and the comedy and darkness of her vision mark her as a worthy heir of Jane Bowles.

Reviews

"Stacey Levine is one of the most interesting writers working in America today, startling and idiosyncratic in the best sense" (San Francisco Bay Guardian)

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. )Bookforum)

"Levine's satire of work is clever, unsettling, and timely." (Kirkus Reviews)

"Levine has made work - an abstract concept - into the backdrop for a frightening piece of prose in which everything matters and everything is presumed and little is understood, a formula indeed for modern angst. . . . Dra- is intoxicating . . . [Levine] is careful with her prose, deliberate and sure-footed, and often darkly funny." (Seattle Weekly)

"Like Camus and Kafka before her, Levine uses the self in relation to society to crack the oppressive ordinariness of normalcy . . . Levine has managed to depict something everyone knows and everyone loathes in a style that mimics the very file-cabinet blandness of her subject, yet still makes for compelling fiction." (Rain Taxi Review of Books)