ccp 007
Frances Johnson (a novel)
by Stacey Levine
230 pp.
isbn-10: 0-9723234-6-5
$12.95






Frances Johnson doesn't want to attend the town dance. But there is pressure. The people of Munson, her small Florida town, make their needs known: Ray, her boyfriend who is "overfocused on world history"; Mal, the horsey, earnest fry cook at Mal's Pico diner, who offers her his cabin; Palmer, the town doctor who can find no cure for the mysterious scar Frances bears; her mother, speaking to her through "the mechanical screeching" of Munson's patched telephone lines. Nearby, a volcano the townspeople call "Sharla" spews lava and stones, lighting the night sky with its portentous burning. At once measured and suspenseful, Frances Johnson is a comedy of manners in the tradition of Jane Bowles.

Praise for the work of Stacey Levine:

"Levine's prose is compelling and intriguing and risky...It gets beneath the skin and searches for vulnerable tissue; not a safe place to be, but certainly worth the danger."
—Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Levine wanders through the house of the psyche, tracking mud on the carpets."
—Seattle Weekly

"Because something very similar once happened to you, you should read this book. There is a secret for your eyes only inside."
—Exquisite Corpse

"Dra— turns that most banal of activities, the search for a job, into a nightmarish pilgrimage of regression and lost selfhood...In polite, literate prose that evokes Kafka, Levine characterizes the quest for employment as a virtually hopeless bid for access to normalcy...Dra— is repeatedly derailed in her job search by her longings to succumb to passivity and aspects of infantilism: fury and greed. The novel takes place at the site of the earliest human issues. Levine even uses overtly Freudian underpinnings, at one point having Dra— nestle jealously between a man and woman who are trying to have sex. Dra—'s longings are clearly lesbian, but like many things about her, her sexuality is located at such a submerged area of childish fantasy that it could scarcely be termed a 'drive.' Levine evokes the early stages of longing with beautiful, arresting prose."
—Kristy Eldredge


Stacey Levine grew up in St. Louis and lives in Seattle. Her collection, My Horse and Other Stories (Sun & Moon Press), won the PEN/West fiction award in 1994. Since then she has published a novel, Dra— (Sun & Moon Press), and short stories in numerous venues. Her criticism has been published by The American Book Review, Rain Taxi, The Seattle Times, The Seattle Weekly, The Stranger, C Magazine (Toronto), and Nest Magazine. Over the past years, she has performed public readings of her work with Karen Finley, Kathleen Hanna, the Black Cat Orchestra, Grace Paley, and Russian novelist Andre Bitov. Kill Rock Stars, a record label from Olympia, WA, issued a spoken word "45" of her work, available through www.killrockstars.com.