Mice 1961 - by Stacey Levine (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

FINALIST, 2025 PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION

NAMED IN WASHINGTON POST'S "50 NOTABLE WORKS OF FICTION" IN 2024

"Stacey Levine's fiction is unlike anything else. Peculiar, vivid, preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition, Mice 1961 is terrific."--Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

A novel set in the Cold War era about two orphaned half-sisters, a boarder, and the neighbors who surround them, a stylized and startling depiction of lives lived at a high pitch of emotion in the shadow of global catastrophe (from the Pulitzer Prize jury's citation).

Stacey Levine's Mice 1961 recounts a pivotal day in the fraught relationship of two orphaned sisters through the eyes of their obsessively observant housekeeper, Girtle. Will Jody be able to cope if her younger sibling Mice, subject to constant harassment in their community for her unusual appearance and habits, leaves home? How will their all-watching companion convey her fierce attachment to them both? As a Greek chorus of local characters cavort and joke their way through a neighborhood party, the sisters and their ardent admirer cross paths with an unsettling stranger, leading to momentous changes for all. Set in southern Florida at the height of cold-war hysteria, Mice 1961 is a powerful meditation on belonging, conformity and otherness.

Review Quotes

"I laughed aloud many times. It was a startled, delighted laughter produced not by commonplace tricks of humor but something singular to Levine's writing: a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I've never seen anywhere else . . . Levine is a gifted performance artist of literary fiction, part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower." - Lydia Millet, Washington Post

"Stacey Levine ignores lyricism as an evolutionary dead end. Life is fractious and dire, her prose style says; let fiction serve as razor and torch. It's not that Levine isn't funny or that she doesn't forge phrases and sentences of throat-clutching beauty. It's just that her effort to dissect humankind's propensity for neuroses, fallacies, and other inanities requires measured drollery and surgical concision." - Donna Seaman, Bookforum

"Electric... As much as it is about otherness, Mice 1961 is about freedom--Jody's control over Mice, Mice's reluctance to assimilate, Girtle's escape from her home just to become second fiddle to two bickering sisters. Freedom, Levine suggests, looks different for everyone. All one has to do is to hold onto it long enough before it gets taken from your grip." - Our Culture

"Stacey Levine's fiction is unlike anything else. Peculiar, vivid, preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition, Mice 1961 is terrific." - Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

"Stacey Levine's reading captivated me... What I was most struck by was the uniqueness of Levine's vision, the hint of strangeness, and the quality of the writing. Sure, you could perhaps compare some of what Levine does to Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, or even George Saunders, but she's pretty much sui generis. You read a Stacey Levine story because you want to read a Stacey Levine story." - Jeff Van der Meer

"Mice 1961 is as enchanting a novel--and as excitingly original, as tunefully phrased, and as discomposingly hilarious--as anything I can ever hope to read. Few writers are ever this alive to language and this tender toward the lot of the vividly different among us. I am in awe." - Garielle Lutz