Big of You

(Paperback)

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Description

Nine loosely linked stories that circle themes of striving and characters who are active and defiant in their desire for independence.

Two young women hitchhike around Europe, discovering uneasy secrets about each other. A casino worker navigates her sad-sack, unlucky life. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague's unexpected death. A sassy millennia-old being is on display as a roadside attraction. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary. Levine's characters grapple with ambition, striving, performativity, and self-sabotage, including the sabotage of memory and memory loss.

At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, defiant, these stories examine striving and ambition under the spectre of late-stage capitalism while contending with the hauntings of the past. The language is turbo-charged, highly expressive, conveying a sense of letting loose. In keeping with its transgressive vocabulary, Big of You captures experiences beyond the norms of realist fiction.

Reviews

Praise for Elise Levine

Levine uses raw, hallucinatory prose to tell this curious story of a woman becoming undone . . . [Blue Field's] visceral wordplay, rough sexuality, and anguished depiction of survivors guilt are bound to captivate its audience. A transgressive, gut-wrenching portrayal of grief that asks what its like to drown.
Kirkus Reviews

Reading [Blue Field] is a sensation akin to drifting weightlessly beneath the surface of the text . . . dazzling, textured, tightly woven.
Music and Literature

Elise Levine writes with a new and exciting type of lyric rhythm. These are stories with the beating heart of poems.
Rion Amilcar Scott, winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction

Elise Levines startling sentences alternate between serrated sentiment and lyrical reverie, offering readers that rarest commoditygenuine surprise.
Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters

Levine addresses questions of identity and the impact of violence as well as addiction, consent, and societys exploitation of trauma, and does so in gorgeous, surprising, and utterly gripping prose.
Elizabeth Hazen, Baltimore Fishbowl

Author Bio

Elise Levine is the author, most recently, of Say This: Two Novellas, the story collection This Wicked Tongue, and the novel Blue Field. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.