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

“The stories in Elise Levine’s latest collection, Big of You, are great travellers. They move through time, scene, and setting like water, seamless and fluid, burbling with questions of personal identity and what it takes to change one’s present or put to bed one’s past.”

—Katherine Abbass, The Ex-Puritan

“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

“Reading Elise Levine is akin to a wild ride down a dark road at night . . . Bold and startling . . . Precipitous and exhilarating.”

—Globe and Mail

“As immersive, hyper-vivid and true as fiction ever gets.”

—Lisa Moore

“A dazzling wordsmith, a lexical tease, Levine is like a kid let loose in a leaf pile, kicking up words for the sheer joy of watching them spin.”

—Toronto Star

“A cutting-edge literary sensation.”

—NOW Magazine

“One of Canada’s finest fiction writers . . . Levine demonstrates a kind of incandescent knowing about human affairs which she deploys in stunningly nuanced passages . . . A sensitive, cagey dominatrix of literary form and human psychology.”

—George Elliott Clarke

“Levine offers a vision and a language so poetically visceral and fiercely poignant—so uniquely intelligent—that story after story I was in awe of her courage and artistry.”

—Barbara Gowdy