Black Freckles: Stories

by Larry Levis

With the publication in 1971 of his first book of poems, Wrecking Crew, Larry Levis at age twenty-five immediately established himself as a literary talent to watch. Since then, four more books and a host of prestigious awards--including the Lamont prize in 1976 for The Afterlife and a National Poetry Series selection in 1981 for The Dollmaker's Ghost--have solidified his reputation as one of our finest contemporary poets. In Black Freckles, his first collection of fiction, Levis switches genres with his dazzling stylistic powers intact. In these eight vivid and unforgettable stories, Levis explores the nature of beauty and loss, and how sometimes they are inextricably connected. Combining a dreamlike sense of time with images startling for their visceral immediacy, Levis's prose astonishes with its imaginative force and linguistic brilliance. In the title story, set in Belgrade, a young man's disturbing ruminations on the world around him depict the injuries a politically repressive society can inflict on the processes of love and memory. "A Divinity in its Fraying Fact" examines the events surrounding the drowning of a young priest, recalled by the boy whose mother discovered the corpse in the family's swimming pool. In "An Illustration of the Castle" Levis reaches across history to present a timeless monologue from a deposed emperor whose conquests ultimately leave him with a sense of loss and futility. Black Freckles pushes the accepted boundaries of the possible in narrative fiction. Each of these stories possesses the same nostalgia-tinged intelligence and lyric energy that has made Larry Levis one of the most widely read and respected poets of our time.

Genres: Short Stories, Poetry

102 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1992

About the author

Larry Patrick Levis was born in Fresno, California, on September 30, 1946. His father was a grape grower, and in his youth Levis drove a tractor, pruned vines, and picked grapes in Selma, California. He earned a bachelor's degree from Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) in 1968, a master's degree from Syracuse University in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1974.

Among his honors were a YM-YWHA Discovery Award, three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Levis died of a heart attack in 1996, at the age of 49.