This is my favorite book of all time. It turns Kafka inside out and often shifts among 5 or 6 conflicting emotions in a single sentence. It does things with language, tone, metaphor, imagery, and characterization that have never ever been done before. And it's hilariously funny! In short, it is absolutely amazing and you must read it as though commanded by God. Seriously.

Dra___, the nondescript heroine of this grim, hilarious fiction, might have fallen through the same hole as Lewis Carrol's Alice, only now, 130 years later, there's no time for frivolity, just the pressing need to get a job. In a sealed, modern Wonderland of "small stifled work centers, basements and sub-basements, night niches, and training hutches connected by hallways just inches across," Dra___ seeks employment. Her concerns are modest and practical. She wanders the "dim empty hallways with their lingering odor of toilets and chalk" looking for the Employment Manager. Dra___ is powered by Stacey Levine's keen ear for the oddities of everyday speech. In her short fiction (collected in the award-winning My Horse and Other Stories) as in her day-to-day life (I've known her both as a columnist for this paper and as a close friend over the last five years) Levine delights in the peculiar logic of "normal conversation." Minor concerns such as plot, characterization, even practical discussions, get undermined by the pleasure she takes in phrases like "in the name of living hell" or "for the love of nonsense," and by her fascination with the sink-hole of sudden intimacy that swallows up so many casual exchanges. In Dra___, the imperatives of plot and thematic resolution have been displaced by the demanding logic of everyday conversation. As a consequence, this Wonderland has none of the arch word-play or punning that afflicted Alice. Instead, people speak as directly as they know how. Like Miss Goering and Miss Gamelon in Jane Bowles' comic masterpiece Two Serious Ladies, the figures in Dra___ burden one another with very plain declarations of their real concerns. "Sometimes it's just good to breathe for a few moments before using the toilet, don't you agree?" a student nurse named Frida asks Dra___. "Dra___ leaned to one of the toilets and delicately opened its enormous lid with her fingertips, a task that drained her so terribly that afterward she sank to the floor to rest. 'I want to see the future,' Frida whispered. 'I want to know how and when I will die, is that so terrible?'" Shorn of euphemism and politesse, the conversations at the heart of this picaresque novel become menacing engines of intimacy, buffeting Dra___ with a storm of confessions and invasive demands. "We'll talk and talk until there's nothing left but ashes all around us," her Christ-like Administrator promises. "Isn't that what a relationship is?" In Dra___, everyone talks about relationships (or "the feelings," as watery-eyed, balding Nanny calls them). Dr. Jack Billy, the "absent-minded doctor of long silences and sudden grimaces" wants to "open his mouth onto another mouth and inhale everything then choke on the lack of air, because the need to damage himself and others was consuming, as it had been all his life." Marla, a clinging woman with "small and scaly-red" eyelids, listens to her confidante, Slim, suggest "'supposing I learn all the most personal, intimate things about you-as if looking right down into your body. And suppose I take hold of those threads that are wound tight around your heart, choking it...Wouldn't it be wonderful? My profession is based upon a form of love, you know.'" These enthusiastic speeches get spewed out like some kind of corrosive agent, a medium transforming hidden human needs into airborne viruses, poisons which infect and make us sick. Thus released, intimacy begins to blur with the real toxins of the work-place ("odorous, dark-soiled plastic sheeting," "buckets filled with soured soup") forming a pathogenic shroud of disease beneath which the hopeful applicant, Dra___, devolves toward hairlessness and torpor. Most of the women are losing their hair. Sores and raw patches pepper their skin. The psychic economy of the body has erupted onto the surface, so that everyone is marked by wounds. They all appear to be dying "They're dying? From what?" Dra___ asks the Adminstrator. "From exposure, my dear, exposure! You know-to the poisons of the worksites, to the people close to them-aren't our deepest feelings known to be poisonous as well?" Dra___ wanders from one enabler to the next, drawn by her search for the job site, and a swelling undertow of desire for Dr. Jack Billy's handsome Nurse. Her episodic narrative is framed by visions of the Man with No Hair, a tiny-footed, recurring figure, whose periodic cameos (carrying a basket of rubber bulbs, pouring pills into his mouth ) give the novel its shape and pacing. This labyrinthine journey is brilliantly mimicked in the architecture of the prose. Levine creates cozy little warrens, small safe spaces made of short clear sentences, then sends the reader spiraling down long broken passages, fragmented by colons and semi-colons which give a halting, lurching gait to our progress. A quest, a comedy of manners, and a parable, Dra___ is, above all else, a philosophical novel concerned with the most basic questions of living. It seals us inside a world where "contact becomes an attack" and where Dra___ can only cry out "until her mouth burned with the simple, punishing taste of wishes.

Stacey Levine's collection, My Horse and Other Stories, and her novel Dra-, are among the most stunningly bizarre and pleasing works of fiction that I have ever read and I count them among only a handful of books that I frequently pick up and begin reading for writerly inspiration, as they defy categorization and never lose their capacity to surprise and amaze. Anyone who seeks writing in the tradition of Kafka and Kobo Abe will absolutely love these books. Publishers Weekly mentions "sacrificing internal logic," but a more accurate description might be either "redefining" it or "not succumbing" to it. If internal logic is tone and voice, then Stacey Levine's work introduces even the most jaded reader to something completely new. As a reviewer once wrote (apparently I am not supposed to refer to reviewers on this page), her writing is often both "simultaneously funny and disturbing," and combined with her rapturous lyricism, the effect is cathartic and out-of-body, even when the writing is explicitly exposing "the oppressive mechanisms" of the body itself, as the reviewer so aptly described it. Even the darkest and most disturbing passages cannot be called "gruesome" (as PW put it) because they are controlled so expertly by Levine's masterful tone that there is always a kind of strange otherworldly beauty that shines through, and humor, uproarious humor that suddenly wells up, making one want to immediately share it with whoever is around, including strangers, for these are among the most laugh-out-loud funny books I have ever read. Even in the darkest most blackly poetic scenes there is a kind of disturbingly giddy humor that makes one want to climb out of one's skin for joy. On the other hand, if what is meant by "internal logic" is the trite conventionality and expectation that continues to hold morbid sway over the dominating and overspent traditions of realism (yes, I am beginning to sound full of myself, sorry) than this is exactly the sort of writing that Levine refuses to succumb to, and that is what makes her writing so great: not tired routine and sleepwork, but high heavenly art. Seriously, buy and read her books. NOW!

On the surface, this book offers startlingly beautiful language and heart-stopping imagery. But its offerings merely begin there. Levine, a master of metaphor and tone, uses these 18 surreal parables to critique power dynamics and to expose the oppressive mechanisms of family, relationships, body and gender. Often simultaneously funny and disturbing, these stories will resonate years after a first reading. Her expert use of the surreal is often called Kafka-esque, an overused and misused literary cliche that, for once, fits the bill. Her keen grasp and expression of humanity's politics precisely suits the Kafka legacy. Her expert use of language and imagery remind us that writing really is an art.