Big of You - by Elise Levine (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In these nine stories, Elise Levine illuminates the aspirations of women and men (and one sassy millennia-old being) as they sift through the midden of their regrets, friendships, and marriages, and seek fresher ways of inhabiting older selves.

Two young women hitchhike around Europe, a lurid secret between them. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague's unexpected death. Ambitious brothers take to the skies in an aerostat in 19th-century Paris. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary.

At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, these stories examine the nuanced, kaleidoscopic dimensions of character, of people driven by ambition yet contending with the hauntings of the past. Spanning various settings and time periods, Big of You captures the everyday and the extraordinary in collisions soaring and earthy, exuberant and visceral.

Review Quotes

Praise for Big of You

"Playful hilarity on some pages is matched by striking loss on others. Levine is a maestro of pacing and a magpie of mesmeric diction."
--Literary Review of Canada

"Throughout, the writing is like a Modernist poem . . . filled with startling images, but also half-thoughts and half-sentences, leaving the reader, like the characters, on the tenterhooks of understanding. Fiction that makes artful demands, and in return, offers substantial rewards."
--Kirkus Reviews

"In Elise Levine's high-voltage collection, she transports us everywhere from a casino to Europe to outer space. These stories crackle with restlessness, longing, and mischief, as characters peel away layers of identity to glimpse what's underneath. Fraught, honest and hilarious, Big of You stretches our imaginations and delightfully capsizes our expectations of selfhood, story, and reality."
--Erika Krouse, author of Save Me, Stranger

"In Big of You, Elise Levine is expert at conveying confusion and dislocation in a magic shorthand that is all hers. Each ingenious sentence blends beauty and sorrow in an intimate voice close to your ear. The writing is whip-smart with heart, it's nutritious, it's everything you need."
--Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man

"Big of You moves through the contours of grief, the gradients of memory, and the foils of artistic ambition, all in honor of the shattered human heart. These stories are both painfully funny and refreshingly earnest, a feat so striking it feels almost impossible that one writer can have such electrifying breadth. When I read Elise Levine, I lose and find myself anew in her lucid prose. That's the power of an Elise Levine sentence--she is singular."
--Alejandro Heredia, author of Loca

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 survivor's guilt are bound to captivate its audience. A transgressive, gut-wrenching portrayal of grief that asks what it's 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 Levine's startling sentences alternate between serrated sentiment and lyrical reverie, offering readers that rarest commodity--genuine surprise."
--Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters

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

About the Author

Elise Levine is the author, most recently, of Say This: Two Novellas, the story collection This Wicked Tongue, and the novel Blue Field. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, The Walrus, and five times in Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.