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Greedy Little Eyes
In Greedy Little Eyes , award-winning writer Billie Livingston explores the universal craving for connection, both emotional and physical.
A young misfit is assaulted by a delusional homeless man and subsequently finds herself caught in the middle of two bullying cops who invite her to hit back; an impulsive and restless mother hungers for independence but wants company along the way; a middle-aged man who yearns for a life off the grid rejects his family and heads into the woods with a young bohemian while he slowly loses his mind; a journalist questions her scruples and complicity after she is invited to visit a friend in New York who is in the midst of an affair with a married man.
Fiercely independent, yet struggling to fit in, isolated but exploding with love and longing, Livingston's characters whisper and roar as they wrestle with the notion of "normal."
A young misfit is assaulted by a delusional homeless man and subsequently finds herself caught in the middle of two bullying cops who invite her to hit back; an impulsive and restless mother hungers for independence but wants company along the way; a middle-aged man who yearns for a life off the grid rejects his family and heads into the woods with a young bohemian while he slowly loses his mind; a journalist questions her scruples and complicity after she is invited to visit a friend in New York who is in the midst of an affair with a married man.
Fiercely independent, yet struggling to fit in, isolated but exploding with love and longing, Livingston's characters whisper and roar as they wrestle with the notion of "normal."
- GenresShort StoriesCanada
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
1 person is currently reading
72 people want to read
About the author
Billie Livingston
14 books63 followersBillie Livingston is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, she grew up in Toronto and Vancouver, and has since lived in Tokyo, Hamburg, Munich, Los Angeles and London, England. Her first employment was filling the dairy coolers in a Macs Milk. She went on to work varying lengths of time as a file clerk, receptionist, cocktail waitress, model, actor, chocolate sampler, and booth host at a plumber’s convention.
Livingston's writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for journalism, the Journey Prize for fiction and the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Greedy Little Eyes, a collection of short stories, was cited by The Globe and Mail and The Georgia Straight as one of the year's best books and the collection went on to win the CBC's Bookie Award as well as the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for Best Short Story Collection. Her 2012 novel, One Good Hustle, was long-listed for the Giller Prize and became a year’s best book selection for several publications including The Globe and Mail, Now Magazine and January Magazine. In 2014, her story, “Sitting on the Edge of Marlene,” was adapted to film by director, Ana Valine and starred Suzanne Clément, Paloma Kwiatkowski, and Callum Keith Rennie.
She lives in Vancouver, BC, with her husband, actor Tim Kelleher.
Livingston's writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for journalism, the Journey Prize for fiction and the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Greedy Little Eyes, a collection of short stories, was cited by The Globe and Mail and The Georgia Straight as one of the year's best books and the collection went on to win the CBC's Bookie Award as well as the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for Best Short Story Collection. Her 2012 novel, One Good Hustle, was long-listed for the Giller Prize and became a year’s best book selection for several publications including The Globe and Mail, Now Magazine and January Magazine. In 2014, her story, “Sitting on the Edge of Marlene,” was adapted to film by director, Ana Valine and starred Suzanne Clément, Paloma Kwiatkowski, and Callum Keith Rennie.
She lives in Vancouver, BC, with her husband, actor Tim Kelleher.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
August 25, 2025
In the grand tradition of the linked short story--such a wonderful form, the short-story novel!--Billie Livingston treats us to an inside look at female uncomfortable teenage. Add in some police action and you have a compelling narrative powering this all-encompassing character study. The stories are tight performances on their own, written with a masterful understanding of what is necessary in a short piece and what should be elided in order to involve the reader.
This book might perhaps be a better overall effort than Livingston's considerable novel output, simply for its economy and accurate portrayal of the desperate. Wonderfully readable.
This book might perhaps be a better overall effort than Livingston's considerable novel output, simply for its economy and accurate portrayal of the desperate. Wonderfully readable.
July 8, 2010
If I could write like Billie Livingston, I'd be a very happy woman.
April 6, 2012
Livingston, who won The Danuta Gleed award for this gorgeous book, wrote a collection of dark, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking, well-crafted stories. Livingston does not shy away from drama, which I love. So many Canadian stories play it safe, afraid of being ‘too much,’ but not Livingston. She gives you murders and suicide, a mother who abducts her daughter’s friend, and it is never too much. Her writing is witty and honest and intimate and begs to be read again. In fact, I just decided I’m going to read it again like, right now.
July 29, 2015
This is the best book of short stories I've read in ages. It features quirky characters and interesting stories told with crisp prose and quick jabs of poetry. Definitely worth a read, and maybe even a second read.
January 12, 2012
Twisted little short stories...I enjoyed this.
March 2, 2015
Loved this book. Unique story lines that twisted and turned and were always always enjoyable. I have recommended it to many.
April 22, 2019
Sharp evocative stories, often funny and weird.
August 21, 2011
Alice told me one night after our father had gone to bed that she’d been thinking maybe this wasn’t right, this business of having multiple lovers. Forty, fifty? How many lovers would she have by the time she was done? She’d be so far into the triple digits, she’d need an abacus to keep track.
Peering into my eyes she added, “There’s no joy in frivolous sex, Angie. I’m lonesome.”
Suddenly self-conscious, I wondered if my envy was always this apparent.
“Maybe I never should have gone with girls at all,” she said. “The Universe is about miracles, and creativity and life. Two girls can’t create life. Two girls… must make no sense to God.”
***
Billie Livingston populates Greedy Little Eyes with tiny, independent disasters—the wreckage and detritus of our daily trespasses, errors in judgement, and complete and utter fuck-ups. From an unstable grasshopper-collecting, wife-murdering uncle, through a possible kleptomaniac, prescription drug-addicted job hunter; backdropped against the Pickton pig farm massacres, nursing homes, shopping centre hostage situations and performance art catastrophes at the Vancouver Art Gallery; through the eyes of those suffering sexual addictions, mental and emotional confusion, and spontaneously-adopted religious piety, nothing in Greedy Little Eyes could be called neat or tidy.
Livingston isn’t interested in tying together loose narrative strands or offering firm conclusions to any of her stories. She’s more interested in the dissection, the pulling apart of tendons without concern for what might be found beneath the first few levels of skin and blood and bone. The result is a collection of stories that hits like a sack of nickels, turning and walking away from the crime without bothering to offer a wet towel for your broken lip.
Set primarily in Vancouver and surrounding areas, with the occasional detour to a New York hotel and locations between, Livingston’s constructed worldview is one that takes the road less written about at every opportunity—never content to follow the path of least resistance. She’s more interested in showing us the life of the daughter who flounders and flails and experiments with sex, religion and parenthood while her instability grows and festers like a cancer, not the life of the one who watches and picks up the pieces of afterbirth with each successive life retooled and reassigned.
Greedy Little Eyes was the winner of this year’s Danuta Gleed Literary Award for short fiction, and it’s not difficult to see why. Livingston’s tendency to walk away from the messes she’s left behind gives these stories a harder edge than most. She’s willing to let the narratives breathe on their own, with or without her presence at the end. There’s confidence in that approach, and it reinforces the diversity and strength of the personal disasters she’s chosen to display. As with all short fiction collections, certain stories are stronger than others—“Before I Would Ever Hurt You”, “Make Yourself Feel Better”, “Did You Grow Up With Money”, and “Georgia, It’s Me” are the standouts—but there are no weak links to Billie Livingston’s surprisingly sane madhouse of characters.
Greedy Little Eyes is not for everyone. The stories are rife with murder, suicide, abuse, exploitation, and a strong amount of sexual/religious/mental confusion. They benefit from this very naked approach, but the harshness of many of the realities in this book, and the manner in which the reader is often left hanging in the thick of an uncomfortable occurrence, might turn some readers off. There are many tonal similarities to Julie Booker’s Up Up Up, released earlier this year. To lovers of that title, Greedy Little Eyes comes highly recommended.
Peering into my eyes she added, “There’s no joy in frivolous sex, Angie. I’m lonesome.”
Suddenly self-conscious, I wondered if my envy was always this apparent.
“Maybe I never should have gone with girls at all,” she said. “The Universe is about miracles, and creativity and life. Two girls can’t create life. Two girls… must make no sense to God.”
***
Billie Livingston populates Greedy Little Eyes with tiny, independent disasters—the wreckage and detritus of our daily trespasses, errors in judgement, and complete and utter fuck-ups. From an unstable grasshopper-collecting, wife-murdering uncle, through a possible kleptomaniac, prescription drug-addicted job hunter; backdropped against the Pickton pig farm massacres, nursing homes, shopping centre hostage situations and performance art catastrophes at the Vancouver Art Gallery; through the eyes of those suffering sexual addictions, mental and emotional confusion, and spontaneously-adopted religious piety, nothing in Greedy Little Eyes could be called neat or tidy.
Livingston isn’t interested in tying together loose narrative strands or offering firm conclusions to any of her stories. She’s more interested in the dissection, the pulling apart of tendons without concern for what might be found beneath the first few levels of skin and blood and bone. The result is a collection of stories that hits like a sack of nickels, turning and walking away from the crime without bothering to offer a wet towel for your broken lip.
Set primarily in Vancouver and surrounding areas, with the occasional detour to a New York hotel and locations between, Livingston’s constructed worldview is one that takes the road less written about at every opportunity—never content to follow the path of least resistance. She’s more interested in showing us the life of the daughter who flounders and flails and experiments with sex, religion and parenthood while her instability grows and festers like a cancer, not the life of the one who watches and picks up the pieces of afterbirth with each successive life retooled and reassigned.
Greedy Little Eyes was the winner of this year’s Danuta Gleed Literary Award for short fiction, and it’s not difficult to see why. Livingston’s tendency to walk away from the messes she’s left behind gives these stories a harder edge than most. She’s willing to let the narratives breathe on their own, with or without her presence at the end. There’s confidence in that approach, and it reinforces the diversity and strength of the personal disasters she’s chosen to display. As with all short fiction collections, certain stories are stronger than others—“Before I Would Ever Hurt You”, “Make Yourself Feel Better”, “Did You Grow Up With Money”, and “Georgia, It’s Me” are the standouts—but there are no weak links to Billie Livingston’s surprisingly sane madhouse of characters.
Greedy Little Eyes is not for everyone. The stories are rife with murder, suicide, abuse, exploitation, and a strong amount of sexual/religious/mental confusion. They benefit from this very naked approach, but the harshness of many of the realities in this book, and the manner in which the reader is often left hanging in the thick of an uncomfortable occurrence, might turn some readers off. There are many tonal similarities to Julie Booker’s Up Up Up, released earlier this year. To lovers of that title, Greedy Little Eyes comes highly recommended.
November 6, 2010
I finished this book last week. And I Loved it. I found some of the stories so raw and personally haunting that I started to reread them already. The writing is straight forward and yet still poetic. Livingston has a way of phrasing things, describing emotions and situations, that causes me to sit up and yell, "yes! that's exactly what it's like!" I'll be hanging on to my copy. But I know what to get my sister for her birthday now.
July 12, 2010
This one really knocked me out. I was so gripped by the stories -- it sounds stupid but I literally laughed out loud and later teared-up in the same story. The writing is strong for sure, but the stories themselves kept me awake at night. I still can't stop thinking about it -- Especially "Do Not Touch" and "Before I Would Ever Hurt You".
July 26, 2010
After the great review in the June 5 Globe and Mail, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the book. This is Livingston at her best. I came close to fisticuffs with my beloved as we fought over the book while on vacation -- we each have a copy but only brought his. Wonderful book of stories. RT
June 1, 2012
This short story collection by Billie Livingston started out a little slow but those last three stories were fantastic. While Livingston is no Alice Munro, and this is not Cease to Blush (her amazing novel) it is a worthwhile read.
Read
February 7, 2011somewhat dark but interesting
December 5, 2015
This did take me awhile to read, only because I would read a story here and there while trying to decide what novel I would read next. I really enjoy Billie Livingston's writing style.
April 4, 2012
I want to write stories like this. Wonderful!
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews