The Girl With Brown Fur: Tales and Stories [Paperback]

Stacey Levine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Levine's new collection (after 1992's My Horse and Other Stories) of 27 quirky short stories constantly challenges readers' notions of reality. Many of her isolated characters live in bizarre, dysfunctional families; in "Uppsala," the snow-bound narrator states, "Our family is sad and does not live in a verdant place." "The Danas" centers on a pallid family so insular that the parents encourage two of their children, who had never "tried a thing in life," to marry each other. Another bizarre family story, "The Parthenogenetic Grandmother," is narrated by a woman who is 21 on the day her grandmother is "born in a tree"; the story follows their twisted, manipulative relationship, a theme that gets carried into the story "And You Are?", in which two older women revisit their childhood relationship as baby-sitter and baby-sat. Loneliness is palpable in "The Cats," a grotesque cloned-pet story, and the quirky kidnapping story "The Girl" runs on a strange clash of characters and emotions. Levine's stories are often thematically ambiguous, and some seem little more than stylistic experiments, but fans of shorter short stories will find much to like.
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About the Author

Stacey Levine: 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).

A Puschcart Prize nominee, her fiction has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Fence, Tin House, The Fairy Tale Review, The Washington Review, the Santa Monica Review, Yeti, and other venues. She has also contributed to the American Book Review, Bookforum, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Fodor's City Guides, The Stranger, The Chicago Reader, and other publications.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 187 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596923105
• ISBN-13: 978-1596923102
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 4.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,978,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stacey Levine wrote My Horse and Other Stories (PEN/West Fiction Award), The Girl with Brown Fur, and the novels Dra--- and Frances Johnson (Finalist, Washington State Book Award). A Puschcart Prize nominee, her fiction has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Fence, Tin House, The Fairy Tale Review, Seattle Magazine, The Washington Review, Santa Monica Review, Yeti, and other venues. She has written for The Chicago Reader, The Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Her one-act play, Susan Moneymaker, Large and Small, was published by Belladonna Books NYC. She received the 2009 Stranger Genius Award for Literature. Her fiction has been translated into Danish and Japanese.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A twisted story with a real tail, September 14, 2009

By 

Evelyn Hampton (Seattle WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Girl With Brown Fur: Tales and Stories (Paperback)

(This is my review for The Girl with Brown Fur on Goodreads and was first posted here--[...])


I was really amazed by this book. I think it is important, urgent, necessary, real, and twisted.

When I started reading these "stories and tales" I was also reading Forces of Imagination by Barbara Guest. In Guest's essay "Why They Are Called Tales" my reading of Levine and Guest intertwined.

Here is Guest in "Why They Are Called Tales"--

Tales are stories about stories; they are brought to us from memory and arrive with often an antique finish; they are also arrived from the deep unconscious of a country or place. Tales may be a residue from childhood. They lived in a more dimensional world than a story that is a reportage, or a story that is about something, or that is current in the world of reporting. I believe that a Tale has more magic than a story. It breathes within a separate world of memory or desire. Its remoteness from the center of things is what is endearing about a Tale and it doesn't tell the truth about itself; it tells us what it dreams about. And remember that a Tale arises from the imagination, and this is what makes a Tale live in another dimension.

So from this other dimension we advance the Tale into our dimension, which means the Tale has been on a long trip when it arrives on the page; this means the Tale can be called more dimensional than a story. Which is not to denigrate the story but to say that the Tale has a twist attached to it; so it is a twisted story with a real tail [33].

+

Probably my favorite from The Girl With Brown Fur is "The World of Barry." It deserves your attention.

Rhubarb is Susan (Simon DeDeo) has a brief review of "The World of Barry" on his blog:

"Stacey's work is billed as a 'story', but I'm going to issue an access card to the poetic avant garde because basically the prose-fiction of the contemporary moment is so broadly dire, unexamined, cacophanated by the unexamined-I that she may require refugee status with us." (Simon DeDeo at his blog, Rhubarb is Susan, [...].)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Discerning "Uppsala", June 28, 2011

By 

Clair - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Girl With Brown Fur: Tales & Stories (Paperback)

The stories and tales in Stacey Levine's "The Girl with Brown Fur" give voice to atmospheres that
exist and persist, but are difficult to get to know in any sort of tangible way.

"Uppsala," the first such experience in her book, invites one in to an atmosphere of
family dreadfulness on the way to a destination informed by snow that falls like
a white mind circulating through and around the impossible tensions and dreads
the family traverses like a well woven web. This continues upon arriving.

It is both relief and homecoming to have this territory named and etched in compelling images,
dialogue, and exposition I've always known, heard, and read somewhere somehow, but never
discerned until this story, one I read and read again with shocked amazement and gratitude.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Self as an Exercise, June 21, 2011

By 

Chris Roberts "Chris Roberts" (Brooklyn NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Girl With Brown Fur: Tales & Stories (Paperback)

The perennial self that takes us from year to year is quite evident in this volume of tales. At its heart a tale is an undercurrent that parallels the storyline, informing it with double meaning naturally and with a strong subtlety (yes you can be strong and subtle in the same pen stroke). It takes a particularly attuned talent to make it real.

Author Stacey Levine lacks such a talent. The self mentioned above quite contaminates her characters, each a thinly veiled reflection of the author, her quirks are theirs and quite tiredly the reader reads on. "Uppsala" is a horrid portrait of the family dismal, a la mode, her "The Cats" is relentlessly ordinary in its attempt to be "anti-ordinary" and the entirety of Levine's prose is reaching and consistently banal. Oh, right, I don't recommend the book.

Chris Roberts