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The Girl With Brown Fur: Tales & Stories
"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).
181 pages, Paperback
First published June 28, 2009
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675 people want to read
About the author
Stacey Levine
19 books69 followersStacey Levine is the author of Pulitzer Prize Finalist Mice 1961. Her other books--The Girl with Brown Fur, Frances Johnson, Dra---, and My Horse and Other Stories, have a devoted following of readers.
Levine's work has garnered a Pulitzer Prize fiction finalist nomination, a PEN fiction award, and Stranger Genius Award in Literature. Her fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Iowa Review, Yeti, The Fairy Tale Review, Your Impossible Voice, Golden Handcuffs Review, and other venues.
A collection of all her short fiction, plays, and co-authored comics to date will be published in 2026.
www.staceylevine.com
Levine's work has garnered a Pulitzer Prize fiction finalist nomination, a PEN fiction award, and Stranger Genius Award in Literature. Her fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Iowa Review, Yeti, The Fairy Tale Review, Your Impossible Voice, Golden Handcuffs Review, and other venues.
A collection of all her short fiction, plays, and co-authored comics to date will be published in 2026.
www.staceylevine.com
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 5, 2022
The longer stories in this collection help it to rise above my estimation of Levine's first collection—which I rather cavalierly refused to review—though I still prefer her in novel form. In this book there are a few shared characters linking stories together, which is always a plus in my mind. However, toward the end the stories veered back to what comprises the bulk of My Horse and Other Stories: brief, quirky character sketches with no real narrative oomph. It became a serious struggle to finish the book at this point. Maybe I am regressing in my appreciation for experimentalism in prose, but dammit I have been craving some good narrative lately and finding nary a whiff of it in my recent reads. Anyhow, I've come to the conclusion that Levine's greatest strength as a writer lies in her long-form depictions of single women in middle age who are very much feeling unmoored and a bit angsty to boot, with a knack for finding themselves in absurd situations. She really channels this pretty unique vibe well. There's a bit of that here in the longer stories, but her novels are mainly where it's at. I'm giving this a 3.5, but rounded up to 4 for the stories I liked most and because I like her novels so much. (I think I also may need to go on another fast from short story collections, as they have been particularly disappointing me lately...).
April 20, 2011
In case you missed it when Macadam/Cage put it out (that's 99% of you), here's my review of Levine's book, which was just reprinted by Starcherone...
I first fell in love with Stacey's writing through her first book, My Horse & Other Stories, which is one of my all-time favorites. She's had a couple of novels between then and now but I've been jonesing for more of her short fiction for too long. This is a great collection full of her usual deadpan humor, seemingly random surrealist touches, and crazy sentences. It's these sentences that really propel this book into an extraordinary place. Sometimes, she's even downright Gary Lutzish! Highlights include: The Girl, And You Are?, The Tree, and How Do Breasts Feel? It's pretty hard to describe the stories plot-wise (some seem devoid of one) but this is one vigorous reading experience. Thank God someone reprinted this.
I first fell in love with Stacey's writing through her first book, My Horse & Other Stories, which is one of my all-time favorites. She's had a couple of novels between then and now but I've been jonesing for more of her short fiction for too long. This is a great collection full of her usual deadpan humor, seemingly random surrealist touches, and crazy sentences. It's these sentences that really propel this book into an extraordinary place. Sometimes, she's even downright Gary Lutzish! Highlights include: The Girl, And You Are?, The Tree, and How Do Breasts Feel? It's pretty hard to describe the stories plot-wise (some seem devoid of one) but this is one vigorous reading experience. Thank God someone reprinted this.
June 2, 2011
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
(Originally written for Daniel Casey's Gently Read Literature.)
Ah, the MFA story collection; has a more beguiling trickster ever existed in the literary world? Originally a cutting-edge means of education at a time when "creative writing" was largely seen as an unworthy subject for university study, over the last 75 years this distilled, often intense artistic format has become a victim of its own success, resulting in a world now so oversaturated with short academic pieces that the genre itself has largely become a self-parodying one, the universe now filled with an unending series of obscure trade paperbacks destined to be picked up only by that author's professors and friends (as well as the occasional random book reviewer). And so do these academic and basement presses keep fighting the good fight, putting out hundreds and hundreds more of these compilations with each passing year, the results sometimes great in quality but with it becoming more and more difficult to justify their existence in general, given how little you usually have to travel anymore to find an existing story collection that's already exactly like it.
Take for example two volumes I recently had the chance to look through, Heather Fowler's Suspended Heart from Aqueous Books, and Stacey Levine's The Girl with Brown Fur from Starcherone Books, itself an imprint of Dzanc Books. Both writers are award-winning academes, one from California and the other from the Pacific Northwest; and frankly, both of their collections feel like the pat results of a year's worth of workshopping with their fellow professors and students, a typical grind through the MFA sausage factory that tends to produce stories that all sorta vaguely sound like each other, and that all tend to coalesce in one's head not long after finishing them into a big blurry blob of magical realism and ten-dollar vocabulary words. I mean, take Suspended Heart for example, which I suppose I would call the better of the two, although truthfully there's not a whole lot of difference between them; it's essentially a book's worth of metaphorical fairytales and fables, which in good Postmodernist fashion examines a series of blase real-world issues (bad jobs, terrible boyfriends) through the filter of made-up genre concepts, such as the title tale for a good example, in which a woman at a mall one day literally loses her heart, placed into a glass jar by a janitor and put on display in the hopes of finding its owner, and eventually becoming the source of all these freaky emotional things that happen to couples whenever they walk too close to it.
It's not a bad story by any means, and Fowler is a more than capable writer; but I just can't help but to feel that I've already read stories like these a million times before, which always seems to be my issue with MFA story collections much more than the quality of the collections themselves. And this is even more pronounced with Levine's book, which frankly just a week after finishing I can barely even remember anything about, other than a vague recollection of finishing each story and thinking, "Really? Was that it?" And that of course is one of the lingering problems of the MFA short story that profoundly contributes to their short mental lifespans; that since character development tends to be much more treasured than plot in most academic writing programs, and since the most prominent style in academic writing is ho-hum social realism, and since most academes tend to live sheltered, uneventful lives, the very subjects of the stories themselves tend to command little attention on their own to begin with, the problem then compounded by the lackluster personal style and tendency to overedit that is so endemic to so much academic writing.
It's a question that budding young writers really owe to themselves to ask, when they sit down to start putting together their first professional manuscripts; that now that they have their training under their belt, how are they now going to differentiate themselves from not only what's come before, but from all their contemporaries churning out those five thousand new fiction titles that are currently being published each year in the United States, every single year without fail? It's a question that academic programs tend not to address, because in many ways it's not the academic world's job to address it -- it's their job instead to crank out well-trained writers, and to make sure by graduation time that they are literal Masters at the fundamentals of the English language and the three-act structure -- but as Fowler and Levine's earnest yet forgettable volumes prove, for a writer to have a true success in the 21st century, they need to know more than just how to dot all their I's and cross all their T's.
Out of 10: 7.5
(Originally written for Daniel Casey's Gently Read Literature.)
Ah, the MFA story collection; has a more beguiling trickster ever existed in the literary world? Originally a cutting-edge means of education at a time when "creative writing" was largely seen as an unworthy subject for university study, over the last 75 years this distilled, often intense artistic format has become a victim of its own success, resulting in a world now so oversaturated with short academic pieces that the genre itself has largely become a self-parodying one, the universe now filled with an unending series of obscure trade paperbacks destined to be picked up only by that author's professors and friends (as well as the occasional random book reviewer). And so do these academic and basement presses keep fighting the good fight, putting out hundreds and hundreds more of these compilations with each passing year, the results sometimes great in quality but with it becoming more and more difficult to justify their existence in general, given how little you usually have to travel anymore to find an existing story collection that's already exactly like it.
Take for example two volumes I recently had the chance to look through, Heather Fowler's Suspended Heart from Aqueous Books, and Stacey Levine's The Girl with Brown Fur from Starcherone Books, itself an imprint of Dzanc Books. Both writers are award-winning academes, one from California and the other from the Pacific Northwest; and frankly, both of their collections feel like the pat results of a year's worth of workshopping with their fellow professors and students, a typical grind through the MFA sausage factory that tends to produce stories that all sorta vaguely sound like each other, and that all tend to coalesce in one's head not long after finishing them into a big blurry blob of magical realism and ten-dollar vocabulary words. I mean, take Suspended Heart for example, which I suppose I would call the better of the two, although truthfully there's not a whole lot of difference between them; it's essentially a book's worth of metaphorical fairytales and fables, which in good Postmodernist fashion examines a series of blase real-world issues (bad jobs, terrible boyfriends) through the filter of made-up genre concepts, such as the title tale for a good example, in which a woman at a mall one day literally loses her heart, placed into a glass jar by a janitor and put on display in the hopes of finding its owner, and eventually becoming the source of all these freaky emotional things that happen to couples whenever they walk too close to it.
It's not a bad story by any means, and Fowler is a more than capable writer; but I just can't help but to feel that I've already read stories like these a million times before, which always seems to be my issue with MFA story collections much more than the quality of the collections themselves. And this is even more pronounced with Levine's book, which frankly just a week after finishing I can barely even remember anything about, other than a vague recollection of finishing each story and thinking, "Really? Was that it?" And that of course is one of the lingering problems of the MFA short story that profoundly contributes to their short mental lifespans; that since character development tends to be much more treasured than plot in most academic writing programs, and since the most prominent style in academic writing is ho-hum social realism, and since most academes tend to live sheltered, uneventful lives, the very subjects of the stories themselves tend to command little attention on their own to begin with, the problem then compounded by the lackluster personal style and tendency to overedit that is so endemic to so much academic writing.
It's a question that budding young writers really owe to themselves to ask, when they sit down to start putting together their first professional manuscripts; that now that they have their training under their belt, how are they now going to differentiate themselves from not only what's come before, but from all their contemporaries churning out those five thousand new fiction titles that are currently being published each year in the United States, every single year without fail? It's a question that academic programs tend not to address, because in many ways it's not the academic world's job to address it -- it's their job instead to crank out well-trained writers, and to make sure by graduation time that they are literal Masters at the fundamentals of the English language and the three-act structure -- but as Fowler and Levine's earnest yet forgettable volumes prove, for a writer to have a true success in the 21st century, they need to know more than just how to dot all their I's and cross all their T's.
Out of 10: 7.5
Currently reading
October 15, 2019i really like the words. i like the way she uses language. my brain is in such a sorry state lately, though, that i find the stories just passing through. even though my brain responds to the way things are written i find that i'm not sure i remember what i have read. i don't know if that makes sense. if it is any sort of review at all, i can think of a few people to recommend this book to... and perhaps things will stay in their brains better than mine.
September 19, 2011
If Lydia Davis and George Saunders had a baby, and that baby was christened by Donald Barthelme... Stacey Levine is something like that.
September 6, 2011
This is one of those books that falls into the zone that reveals my ignorance. I'm pretty comfortable, I think, with what I take to be the two primary modes of American fiction, those that are strictly narrative and those which are primarily language driven. This book, and I've read others like it, works differently; language is at play here, though the writing itself is kind of strangled with abstraction: imagine a Marianne Moore prose work, full of archaisms and slightly adjacent meanings, and you'll get a sense of my meaning. But narrative, too, feels slightly off, as stories seem to wrench from place to place, a kind of world-building where nearly anything could happen next, seemingly without regard to what came previous. Characters are exploring new worlds for us, I guess, and using slightly odd language to describe it.
What impressed me about this book, even as I sometimes struggled to enjoy it, was the range of approaches Levine takes in the twenty or so stories here-- there were, to me, definite sections, places where she's working a particular part of the broad form I outlined above. It's interesting, then, to see her methodically try to find new ways to estrange meaning-- in the end, I think that's the point of this kind of writing, to challenge and engage us, to make us read differently. And for me, this book did that, even when it made me a little cranky to have to keep doing it.
What impressed me about this book, even as I sometimes struggled to enjoy it, was the range of approaches Levine takes in the twenty or so stories here-- there were, to me, definite sections, places where she's working a particular part of the broad form I outlined above. It's interesting, then, to see her methodically try to find new ways to estrange meaning-- in the end, I think that's the point of this kind of writing, to challenge and engage us, to make us read differently. And for me, this book did that, even when it made me a little cranky to have to keep doing it.
February 14, 2012
Short stories that sure, are written by somebody who has a good vocabulary, quite an imagination, and loves understatement and odd, very odd, juxtapositions, but compared to her novel "Dra----", I thought these stories more an exercise rather than an inspiration, or even compulsion. That said, as jonathan evison blurbed "A few words about Stacey Levine: Brilliant, Surprising, Unsettling. One of a kind." that describes these stories pretty well too, except maybe add, why?
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March 25, 2020I ordinarily read non-fiction - histories, biographies, etc. - but some of the best and most exciting writing is in fiction. The stories in this volume are quirky, surreal, funny or off-putting. Some don't have a linear beginning, middle and end, and others don't seem to go anywhere. But it's a fun ride. We meet a woman who wants to steal (she never uses the word kidnap) a sickly young girl from an unloving guardian; a man who can't get rid of unwelcome guests so he winds up killing them; and a bean with human qualities who meets ``a pretty pea who flirted with her bottom,'' my favorite line in the book. Can someone be drawn to a piece of writing they don't quite understand. I was almost magnetically drawn to a story called ``Scoo Boy.'' The passion and desperation of the writer practically leaps off the page and the story reaches its crescendo with a stream of consciousness against the city, society and the world. But I'm not sure who the narrator is - Scoo Boy's mother, his lover - and what happened to Scoo Boy? Described as a glider who wanted to be a boxer or a stunt driver, did Scoo Boy die or just disappear? And does it matter if I loved the story. Some reviewers have said that Stacey Levine should be more well-known. How true. For lovers of fiction, her books are worth looking for.
September 15, 2012
I found these stories to be fairly unusual. I wouldn't exactly call them surrealism, because they don't feel quite like that, but I definitely wouldn't call them realism. They are dreamlike, but don't exactly feel like dreams either, or waking. They seem to be in some sort of boundary area between all of these things, straightforward though grasp of them is elusive. I'm just not entirely sure what to make of them, though I enjoyed reading them a great deal. I think these are stories that need at least a second pass, if not a third.
November 13, 2012
The prose style reminded me of something like a cross between the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales and Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler, which is to say this is an interesting, dense, sometimes entirely non-nonsensical collection of fairy tales for adults. I enjoyed this a lot more than Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, which was from the same press and had some very similar content. Levine is a highly empathetic writer but also isn't afraid to explore some of her characters' more despicable thoughts.
March 26, 2018
I read half of this, and just didn't want to continue. I like to read short stories that make me want to know more of the story, it's a good kind of want. I was just annoyed and bothered by these stories, and had no interest in any of them.
August 15, 2011
I reviewed this at
Necessary Fiction
October 16, 2016
wanted to like the stories in this book but it was difficult. seemed all over the place.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews