The Hitch - by Sara Levine (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"A wonderful storyteller with a vibrant voice."--New York Times

From the author of the cult classic Treasure Island!!!, a delightfully unhinged comedy following a woman as she attempts to exorcise the spirit of a dead corgi from her nephew and renegotiate the borders of her previously rational world

Rose Cutler defines herself by her exacting standards. As an anti-racist, Jewish secular feminist eco-warrior, she is convinced she knows the right way to do everything, including parent her six-year-old nephew Nathan. When Rose offers to look after him while his parents visit Mexico for a week, her brother and sister-in-law reluctantly agree, provided she understands the rules--routine, bedtime, homework--and doesn't overstep. But when Rose's Newfoundland attacks and kills a corgi at the park, Nathan starts acting strangely: barking, overeating, talking to himself. Rose mistakes this behavior as repressed grief over the corgi's death, but Nathan insists he isn't grieving, and the dog isn't dead. Her soul leaped into his body, and now she's living inside him. Now Rose must banish the corgi from her nephew before the week ends and his parents return to collect their child.

With the ferocious absurdity of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch and the dark, brazen humor of Melissa Broder's Death Valley, The Hitch is a tantalizingly bizarre novel about loneliness, bad boundaries, and the ill-fated strategy of micromanaging everything and everyone around you.

Review Quotes

Praise for Sara Levine:

"Levine is a wonderful storyteller with a vibrant voice. Treasure Island!!! is a rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent. Levine has created a quintessential unreliable narrator, one who sees other people's flaws perfectly and almost never her own."--New York Times

"[An] irreverent comic novel of self-empowerment."--O, the Oprah Magazine

"A hoot."--Kirkus Reviews

"Incisive and intelligent . . . compelling."--Buzzfeed

"Short and absolutely delightful."--Electric Lit Books

"Levine . . . is a tremendously funny writer."--Time Out Chicago

"Insane, hilarious, and irreverent."--Alice Sebold, author of the bestselling novel The Lovely Bones

"Slightly deranged and marvelous."--Marcy Dermansky, author of Hurricane Girl

"Throw yourself headlong into the tornado of chaos that is the protagonist of Sara Levine's Treasure Island!!!"-- Vulture

"Darkly funny."--Travel and Leisure

"Levine manages to get serious by retaining a sense of humour."--London Review of Books

"I found Treasure Island!!! to be a total hoot. Outrageous!!! Delightful!!!"--NPR - Nancy Pearl Unearths Great Summer Reads

"Levine is fantastically talented."--Jewish Daily Forward

"Treasure Island!!! is a girl's own self-helpless book, a parody of family memoirs, with a serious undercurrent."--Toronto Globe & Mail

"Treasure Island!!! is unstoppably funny."--San Francisco Chronicle

"It's really good!!! And funny!!!"--Chicago Reader

"A wild, funny, rambunctiously surprising look at what happens when the very thing needed to shake up a life does its job far too well."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"I laughed my way through...this addictive little pageturner."--The Boston Bibliophile

"Levine's subtle insight about the egocentric nature of our society is knife-sharp."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"I was taken in instead by the subtle drawing of its characters and their misdeeds."--Tin House

"An absurdist comedy of suburbia."--New York Times

"Levine sports an original, brutally witty voice."--Washington Post

"This highly original, farcical novel will keep you entertained."--Library Journal

"This book is a wonder. I laughed out loud early and kept on laughing, sometimes with recognition, sometimes with sheer delight at the precision with which Levine portrays the bafflement of being human and interacting with other humans."--Matthea Harvey, author of Modern Life

"Hemingway said somewhere that he wanted to write like Cezanne painted. In her vivid hyper-real collection, Short Dark Oracles, Sara Levine paints her way into even sharper and more dangerous corners. The fictions are an impasto of primed primary colors, prose that cuts a swath in brilliant swatches of saturated power that pops, punches, turns every turn into a fat flat facet, hard as a side of diamond, steel still-lives, glittering, metallic, distilled. Ernest be damned, I want to write like Sara Levine writes."--Michael Martone, author of Plain Air

"Levine's narrators are self-aware, self-deprecating, sardonic and more than a little funny."--Cooper Renner, author of Dr. Jesus and Mr. Dead

"Hilarious and triumphant . . . you will marvel over Levine's intelligent, passionate mind."--Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8

About the Author

Sara Levine is the author of the novel Treasure Island!!! and the short story collection Short Dark Oracles. Her essays, stories, and aphorisms have appeared in various magazines including The Iowa Review, Nerve, Conjunctions, Necessary Fiction, Sonora Review, and others. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago, IL.