DRA- (New American Fiction Series) - Softcover

Levine, Stacey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557132887 ISBN 13: 9781557132888

Publisher: Sun & Moon Books, 1998

Synopsis

Dra-, Levine's first long fictional work, takes the reader into the comic, yet dystopic world of the title character, who inhabits a drab and dreary world of utter dread. The work begins with her visit to an employment agency which punishes the terrified woman for being unable to chose between potential jobs, culminating in a terrible vision of rage and torture which the all-controlling Administrator proclaims is merely a self-tyranny. Levine's new work explores, through a Kafka-like world, how the meek and sane are made mad in a society that demands choices that only lead to less and less individual choice and control. Levine's characters may have difficulty functioning in the so-called "normal" world, but in her exploration of that world we recognize that the terror they feel is justified as we witness, with increasing horror, the insanity of the world we ourselves inhabit.

About this title

Review:

"Stacey Levine is one of the most interesting writers working in America today, startling and idiosyncratic in the best sense" ("San Francisco Bay Guardian")
"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." )"Bookforum")
"Levine's satire of work is clever, unsettling, and timely." ("Kirkus Reviews")
"Levine has made work - an abstract concept - into the backdrop for a frightening piece of prose in which everything matters and everything is presumed and little is understood, a formula indeed for modern angst. . . . "Dra-" is intoxicating . . . [Levine] is careful with her prose, deliberate and sure-footed, and often darkly funny." ("Seattle Weekly")
"Like Camus and Kafka before her, Levine uses the self in relation to society to crack the oppressive ordinariness of normalcy . . . Levine has managed to depict something everyone knows and everyone loathes in a style that mimics the very file-cabinet blandness of her subject, yet still makes for compelling fiction." ("Rain Taxi Review of Books")

About this edition

• Publisher: Sun & Moon Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1557132887
• ISBN 13: 9781557132888
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 150