In The Girl With Brown Fur Stacey Levine has invented stories that will thrill readers of literary fiction who hunger for an innovative American voice. No two of these fictions are alike, and yet in each, an otherworldly beauty shines through as Levine probes the basic human desire for connection. In The Cats,” Brook has her beloved cat and sole companion Sis cloned, in order to avoid being alone. In The World of Barry” a wife lauds the comforts that come from being married to a seemingly ordinary man named Barry. In Lax Forb,” a successful young businessman feels his body evaporating while in a taxi on his way from Cincinnati to Akron. And in The Wolf,” a neurologist escapes the pressures of the city and his marriage for the woods, only to encounter a smiling wolf amongst the trees.

Rooted in the quotidian and often mundane details of everyday life, these stories turn our expectations upside down. Magical, funny, and often darkly poetic, these are modern tales that mine the borders between dreams and conscious life, inviting us on a voyage through places and times at once deeply familiar and wondrously strange.