Big of You

In these nine stories, Elise Levine illuminates the aspirations of women and men (and one sassy millennia-old being) as they sift through the midden of their regrets, friendships, and marriages, and act on the determination to seek fresher ways of inhabiting older selves.

Two young women hitchhike around Europe, a lurid secret between them. A casino worker navigates her once sad-sack, unlucky life. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague’s unexpected death. Ambitious brothers take to the skies in an aerostat in 19th-century Paris. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary.

At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, these stories examine the nuanced, kaleidoscopic dimensions of character, of people driven by ambition yet contending with the hauntings of the past. Spanning various settings and time periods, Big of You captures the everyday and the extraordinary in collisions soaring and earthy, exuberant and visceral.

Elise Levine is the author, most recently, of Say This: Two Novellas, the story collection This Wicked Tongue, and the novel Blue Field. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, The Walrus, and five times in Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

ISBN: 9781771966924
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: September 09, 2025

Praise for Big of You"Playful hilarity on some pages is matched by striking loss on others. Levine is a maestro of pacing and a magpie of mesmeric diction."—Literary Review of Canada"In Elise Levine’s high-voltage collection, she transports us everywhere from a casino to Europe to outer space. These stories crackle with restlessness, longing, and mischief, as characters peel away layers of identity to glimpse what’s underneath. Fraught, honest and hilarious, Big of You stretches our imaginations and delightfully capsizes our expectations of selfhood, story, and reality."—Erika Krouse, author of Save Me, Stranger"In Big of You, Elise Levine is expert at conveying confusion and dislocation in a magic shorthand that is all hers. Each ingenious sentence blends beauty and sorrow in an intimate voice close to your ear. The writing is whip-smart with heart, it’s nutritious, it’s everything you need."—Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man"Big of You moves through the contours of grief, the gradients of memory, and the foils of artistic ambition, all in honor of the shattered human heart. These stories are both painfully funny and refreshingly earnest, a feat so striking it feels almost impossible that one writer can have such electrifying breadth. When I read Elise Levine, I lose and find myself anew in her lucid prose. That’s the power of an Elise Levine sentence—she is singular."—Alejandro Heredia, author of LocaPraise for Elise Levine“Reading Elise Levine is akin to a wild ride down a dark road at night . . . Bold and startling . . . Precipitous and exhilarating.”—Globe and Mail “As immersive, hyper-vivid and true as fiction ever gets.”—Lisa Moore“A dazzling wordsmith, a lexical tease, Levine is like a kid let loose in a leaf pile, kicking up words for the sheer joy of watching them spin.”—Toronto Star “A cutting-edge literary sensation.”—NOW Magazine“One of Canada’s finest fiction writers . . . Levine demonstrates a kind of incandescent knowing about human affairs which she deploys in stunningly nuanced passages . . . A sensitive, cagey dominatrix of literary form and human psychology.”—George Elliott Clarke“Levine offers a vision and a language so poetically visceral and fiercely poignant—so uniquely intelligent—that story after story I was in awe of her courage and artistry.”—Barbara Gowdy