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
Stacey Levine's new novel 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.
"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
"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
"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
Hailed by the San Francisco Bay Guardian as "one of the most interesting writers working in America today," Stacey Levine is the author of four previous books, has received a PEN Fiction Award and a Stranger Genius Award for Literature, and has twice been shortlisted for a Washington State Book Award.
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