Mice 1961 - by Stacey Levine (Paperback)

About the Book

"Recounts a pivotal day in the fraught relationship of two orphaned sisters through the eyes of their obsessively observant housekeeper. Will Jody be able to cope if her younger sibling Mice, subject to constant harassment in their community for her unusual appearance and habits, leaves home? How will their all-watching companion convey her fierce attachment to them both? When they encounter with an unsettling stranger at a neighborhood party, each of them is driven toward momentous changes. Set in southern Florida at the peak of Cold War hysteria, this novel is a powerful meditation on belonging and separateness, conformity and otherness"--

Book Synopsis

FINALIST, 2025 PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION

WINNER, 2025 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD

ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S "50 NOTABLE WORKS OF FICTION" IN 2024

"Stacey Levine's fiction is unlike anything else. Peculiar, vivid, preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition, Mice 1961 is terrific."--Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

A novel set in the Cold War era about two orphaned half-sisters, a boarder, and the neighbors who surround them, a stylized and startling depiction of lives lived at a high pitch of emotion in the shadow of global catastrophe (from the Pulitzer Prize jury's citation).

Stacey Levine's Mice 1961 recounts a pivotal day in the fraught relationship of two orphaned sisters through the eyes of their obsessively observant housekeeper, Girtle. Will Jody be able to cope if her younger sibling Mice, subject to constant harassment in their community for her unusual appearance and habits, leaves home? How will their all-watching companion convey her fierce attachment to them both? As a Greek chorus of local characters cavort and joke their way through a neighborhood party, the sisters and their ardent admirer cross paths with an unsettling stranger, leading to momentous changes for all. Set in southern Florida at the height of cold-war hysteria, Mice 1961 is a powerful meditation on belonging, conformity and otherness.

Review Quotes

"I laughed aloud many times. It was a startled, delighted laughter produced not by commonplace tricks of humor but something singular to Levine's writing: a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I've never seen anywhere else . . . Levine is a gifted performance artist of literary fiction, part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower."--Lydia Millet, Washington Post

"Mice 1961 is as enchanting a novel--and as excitingly original, as tunefully phrased, and as discomposingly hilarious--as anything I can ever hope to read. Few writers are ever this alive to language and this tender toward the lot of the vividly different among us. I am in awe."--Garielle Lutz

"Stacey Levine ignores lyricism as an evolutionary dead end. Life is fractious and dire, her prose style says; let fiction serve as razor and torch. It's not that Levine isn't funny or that she doesn't forge phrases and sentences of throat-clutching beauty. It's just that her effort to dissect humankind's propensity for neuroses, fallacies, and other inanities requires measured drollery and surgical concision." --Donna Seaman, Bookforum