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• David Levinson is a young 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 David Levinson ages ago—they feel that timeless and essential. Bret Easton Ellis

• David Levinson's stories are funny, smart and inventive; they are about an engaging variety of nuts and sluts, and like Salinger's motley cast of characters in Nine Stories, you actually read them wondering what is going to happen next. I'm a huge fan! Mary Gaitskill

• These gutsy, engaging 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

• David 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

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