A brilliant debut . . . Sad, funny, and always wise, Levy’s stories reveal truths about how we love and lose, trust and betray, with an intelligence that takes my breath away. I’ll be returning to these wonderful stories again and again.
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This debut collection . . . is wholly beguiling and authoritative, an instruction from first page to last. E. J. Levy has a noticing eye, an epigrammatic way of describing the world, and what she looks at is both freshly seen and shown. Love, in Theory is a practical manual for beginners at and adepts of love, for young and old, for the unrequited and faithful and faithless―which is to say, for us all.
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Selfishness has never been sent up as mordantly as it is in E. J. Levy’s debut collection of stories.
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E.J. Levy’s stories brilliantly and winningly reveal the human heart as it strives to measure its own beating through love. Love, in Theory is a collection richly worthy of Flannery O’Connor’s name.
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[I]ndulge with this clever recipe of intelligent romance.
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Levy’s artful debut story collection finds varied characters―young and old, male and female―confronting the ornery manifestations and delusions of modern love. . . . Levy’s ten engaging stories speak to the sorcery of the heart.
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In all the stories in Love, In Theory, you can see Levy’s careful writing. There is rarely a word out of place, and each story offers a new meditation, if you will, on the nautre of love without giving in to cliché. This is a smart, smart book.
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A master of [her] form. . . . Levy is skilled at bringing [her] characters to life, each story searingly made real through [her] subtlety and fastidious attention to detail.
2014 New Writers Award for Fiction, Great Lakes Colleges Association
2013 Best Indie Books of the Year, Kirkus Reviews
2012 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Bronze) for Fiction
2012 Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, Publishing Triangle, Finalist
In ten captivating and tender stories, E. J. Levy takes readers through the surprisingly erotic terrain of the intellect, offering a smart and modern take on the age-old theme of love whether between a man and woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a mother and a child drawing readers into tales of passion, adultery, and heartbreak. A Brooklyn woman is thrown out of an ashram for choosing earthly love over enlightenment. A disheartened English professor s life changes when she goes rock climbing and falls for an outdoorsman. A gay oncologist attending his sister s second wedding ponders dark matter in the universe and the ties that bind us. Three psychiatric patients, each convinced that he is Christ, give rise to a love affair in a small Minnesota town. A lesbian student of film learns theories of dramatic action the hard way by falling for a married male professor. Wittily incorporating theories from physics to film to philosophy, from Rational Choice to Thorstein Veblen sTheory of the Leisure Class, these stories movingly explore the heart and mind shooting cupid s arrow toward a target that may never be reached.
“A master of her form. . . . Levy is skilled at bringing her characters to life, each story searingly made real through her subtlety and fastidious attention to detail.”
Publishers Weekly
Levy s taut prose, intelligence and emotional acuity penetrate nearly every sentence. Fans of Amy Bloom s short stories are likely to savor Levy s work. Readers will likely savor this collection for its intoxicating language and introspection.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Levy’s artful debut story collection finds varied characters young and old, male and female confronting the ornery manifestations and delusions of modern love. . . . Levy’s ten engaging stories speak to the sorcery of the heart.”
Booklist
A brilliant debut . . . Sad, funny, and always wise, Levy s stories reveal truths about how we love and lose, trust and betray, with an intelligence that takes my breath away. I ll be returning to these wonderful stories again and again.
Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Levy is a master at holding readers in her grasp until the final sentence.
Louisville Post and Courier
Full of love at its best and worst, Love, in Theory is a readable, addictive collection of stories about love, lust, loss, and loneliness.
The Picky Girl blog
Theory is, in essence, a kind of faith. Love, in Theory is an often tender, sometimes ribald, and always affecting exploration of the ways we put that beautiful, improbable faith into action.
Nervous Breakdown blog
E. J. LEVY s work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Missouri Review,Gettysburg Review, the New York Times, and Best American Essays and has received a Pushcart Prize and Nelson Algren Finalist Award among other honors. She is also the author of the memoirAmazons: A Love Story and editor of Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, which won the Lambda Literary Award. Levy teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University.
Cover design:
Cover illustration:
Author photo: Maureen Stanton
The University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
ISBN 978-0-8203-4827-8
About the Author
E. J. LEVY’s work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, the New York Times, and Best American Essays and has received a Pushcart Prize and Nelson Algren Finalist Award among other honors. She is also the author of the memoir Amazons: A Love Story and editor of Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, which won the Lambda Literary Award. Levy teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University.
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