Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will

Product Description Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will is a strikingly accomplished debut story collection about love, loss, sex, and survival in the hard heart of Texas. In Jaguar, a young woman recently back from a stint in the Peace Corps believes that shes the cause of the breast cancer that led to her sisters double mastectomy. A wife and mother, mourning the loss of her son by burning the boxes that contained his life, must also come to terms with a visit from her sons lover and her husbands infidelity in Things You Can Expect From Your Loved Ones. In Quite Cold In Alaska, a promising road trip up the California coast turns into a meditation on familial expectation and disappointment when the addled matriarch goes missing. And in the eponymous title story, Most Of Us Are Here Against Our Will, which won an award in The Atlantic Monthly, an hysterical young man, unable to move past a torturous family secret, finds help and solace in a therapy group full of others just like him.Peopled with reluctant porn stars and directors, failing actors, a misguided cheerleader, a murderous, vengeful writer, and many others, these nine stories are, according to Bret Easton Ellis, direct, emotional, and compulsively readable. Mary Gaitskill, of Dont Cry and Veronica, has said that they are about an engaging variety of nuts and sluts, and you actually read them wondering what is going to happen next. Levinsons talent is as big as the state about which hes writing. Im a big fan. And Edmund White, of A Boys Own Story, has called Levinsons world acetylene hot...Theres something as raw and frightening and egotistical in these men and women as in Homeric heroes. Read them and love them as much as I do. From the Back Cover Praise for Most Of Us Are Here Against Our Will... David Samuel 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 metafictional devices here. Hes a neotraditionalist so the stories are direct, emotional and compulsively readable, plus theres 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 havent heard from Levinson ages agothey feel that timeless and essential.? Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho David Samuel Levinsons stories are funny, smart and inventive; they are about an engaging variety of heartbreakers and the heartbroken, and you actually read them wondering what is going to happen next. Like Salingers motley cast of characters, the stories in Levinsons collection are always surprising and haunting to the very last word. ? Mary Gaitskill, author of Dont Cry and Veronica 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, alwaysin the best sense of the wordsurprising: stories to reread, and to pass on. ? David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language Of Cranes and The Indian Clerk David Samuel Levinsons world is acetylene hot. His characters may be wearing designer clothes, but theyre about to slug it out like their Texas forbears. Theres 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, author of A Boys Own Story About the Author David Samuel Levinson is the author of the collection of stories, Most Of Us Are Here Against Our Will, and a forthcoming novel, Antonia Lively Breaks The Silence (Algonquin Books, 2012). Hes been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and won an award for fiction in The Atlantic Monthly. Hes received multiple fellowships from Yaddo, the Jentel Foundation, the Millay Colony, Ledig House, Pouch Cove, the S