Nine loosely linked stories that circle themes of striving and characters who are active and defiant in their desire for independence.

Two young women hitchhike around Europe, discovering uneasy secrets about each other. A casino worker navigates her sad-sack, unlucky life. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague’s unexpected death. A sassy millennia-old being is on display as a roadside attraction. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary. Levine’s characters grapple with ambition, striving, performativity, and self-sabotage, including the sabotage of memory and memory loss.

At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, defiant, these stories examine striving and ambition under the spectre of late-stage capitalism while contending with the hauntings of the past. The language is turbo-charged, highly expressive, conveying a sense of letting loose. In keeping with its transgressive vocabulary, Big of You captures experiences beyond the norms of realist fiction.

Elise Levine's profile page

Elise Levine is the author, most recently, of Say This: Two Novellas, the story collection This Wicked Tongue, and the novel Blue Field. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

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