What the experts are saying⇾ David Samuel Levinson is a writer who has mastered all the elements that make up a classically structured short story: drama, suspense, humor, empathy. There are no fancy pyrotechnics or meta-fictional devices here. He's a neo-traditionalist so the stories are direct, emotional and compulsively readable, plus there's enough mystery and action in them to propel at least a dozen novels. These stories, about families and lovers and loss and surviving, make a reader wonder why we haven't heard from Levinson ages ago—they feel that timeless and essential. ⇾ Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho These gutsy, irresistible stories introduce a voice in American fiction from which we are destined to hear more in the future. They are elegant, swift, sometimes heartbreaking, always—in the best sense of the word—surprising: stories to re-read, and to pass on. ⇾ David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language Of Cranes and The Indian Clerk |
I've read all of Levinson's stories from the beginning. He's a natural-born storyteller with an eye for what moves and scares us. His characters get involved in all kinds of shenanigans and by the time you're in the middle of a story, you want to climb inside it to let everyone about the danger lurking around every corner and come up with an escape route as quickly as possible. I read Levinson's stories for pleasure but also for the wickedly beautiful prose that hides within it one disturbing truth after another. ⇾ Robert Goolrick, Author of The Fall of Princes David Samuel Levinson's world is acetylene hot. His characters may be wearing designer clothes, but they're about to slug it out like their Texas forbears. There's something as raw and frightening and egotistical in these men and women as in Homeric heroes. Theirs are not lives of quiet desperation but of sudden vituperative violence. ⇾ Edmund White, author of The Married Man |