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An essay of mine, "How 'Heated Rivalry' Thawed the Chill Between My Father and Me," appeared in Modern Love in The New York Times on February 27, 2026.
I’m the author of two novels, Tell Me How This Ends Well and Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence. My work has appeared in Hobart, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, West Branch, StorySouth, The Brooklyn Review, The Toronto Quarterly, and other literary journals. It has been recognized by The Atlantic Monthly, where Mary Gaitskill selected the winning story; by the Flannery O’Connor Story Prize, where I was a first runner-up; and by the Pirate's Alley Faulker Society, where I won third place for my debut novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence. I’ve received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Jentel, Ledig House, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Santa Fe Arts Institute, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Emory University, where I served as a Fiction Fellow from 2013 to 2015. I’ve also served as the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and as a writer-in-residence at Texas A&M University. In 2020, I founded The Big Texas Author Talk, a virtual lecture series highlighting contemporary Texas writers. I’m the recipient of a Fulbright-Mach Award from Fulbright Austria and recently returned from a Fulbright Fellowship in Vienna (2024–2025), where I was researching and revising a new novel. |
What other writers have said:
A wickedly funny, intelligent examination of the dynamics of a uniquely strange family, with David Samuel Levinson guiding these characters through a plot that intensifies in unexpected ways. Against a backdrop that feels both terrifying and utterly plausible, Levinson again and again finds ways to make the struggles of this clan explode with a kind of humor most writers could not dream of pulling off. A daring, memorable novel.
⇾ Kevin Wilson, author of Now Is Not the Time to Panic
An absolute joyride through the dark, beautiful terrain of the near future. Reading these pages is a deep pleasure, seeing these crystalline sentences pour forth, each one full of life and imagination. I loved this book and will continue to read it.
⇾ Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories
Essential reading for our times.
⇾ Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves
Like absolutely nothing I’ve read before, Levinson’s brilliantly unsettling, fiercely funny novel takes on both dangerous intolerance in the near-future world and the confines of one wildly destructive family, where ties tighten like nooses and kith and kin can become warring political systems. Affecting and hilarious, filled with dark truths that gleam like jewels. I totally loved it.
⇾ Caroline Leavitt, author of Cruel Beautiful World
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 warn everyone about the danger lurking around every corner and to 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 them, 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, frightening, and egotistical in these men and women as in Homeric heroes. Their lives are not ones of quiet desperation but of sudden, vituperative violence.
⇾ Edmund White, author of The Married Man
David Samuel Levinson is a writer who has mastered all the elements that make up a classically structured short story: drama, suspense, humor, and 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, with enough mystery and action 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 & The Shards
These gutsy, irresistible stories introduce a voice in American fiction that we are destined to hear more from. They are elegant, swift, sometimes heartbreaking, always—in the best sense of the word—surprising: stories to re-read and pass on.
⇾ David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language Of Cranes and The Indian Clerk