The Girl with Brown Fur: Tales and Stories

Levine's new collection (after 1992's My Horse and Other Stories) of 27 quirky short stories constantly challenges readers' notions of reality. Many of her isolated characters live in bizarre, dysfunctional families; in ""Uppsala,"" the snow-bound narrator states, ""Our family is sad and does not live in a verdant place."" ""The Danas"" centers on a pallid family so insular that the parents encourage two of their children, who had never ""tried a thing in life,"" to marry each other. Another bizarre family story, ""The Parthenogenetic Grandmother,"" is narrated by a woman who is 21 on the day her grandmother is ""born in a tree""; the story follows their twisted, manipulative relationship, a theme that gets carried into the story ""And You Are?"", in which two older women revisit their childhood relationship as baby-sitter and baby-sat. Loneliness is palpable in ""The Cats,"" a grotesque cloned-pet story, and the quirky kidnapping story ""The Girl"" runs on a strange clash of characters and emotions. Levine's stories are often thematically ambiguous, and some seem little more than stylistic experiments, but fans of shorter short stories will find much to like.