“House Parties offers the wisdom and humor of a keen eye and a kind heart. Lynn Levin writes beautiful prose so skilled that it seems unselfconscious while being replete with perfectly balanced sentences, brilliant metaphors, and similes. Levin’s spirited imagination is a delight. These stories are amusing, startling, poignant, heartwarming. House Parties is a book to read, savor and return to again.”
– The Massachusetts Review
“A collection of vivid, funny, and quietly powerful short stories. House Parties may break your heart, but it’ll never do it the same way twice.”
– Philadelphia Magazine
“A tour de force. There are too few recent story collections today with House Parties‘ ambition to jump between generations, cities, points-of-view, character occupations, and narrative pacing styles. All in all, House Parties is not to be missed. It’s not often you read a story about three millennial guys hiking, followed by a story of Jewish Americans in the latter half of the 20th century.”
– Painted Bride Quarterly
“In the short stories of Lynn Levin’s wry, tragicomic collection House Parties, some people struggle; others behave badly. Morality balances on a precipice in the lingering short stories of House Parties, which are unflinching in exposing how people sometimes know what’s right, but still choose to do otherwise.”
–Foreword Reviews
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“House Parties is a triumph of compassion, potent perfection, and unforgettable stories. An
enormous collection of short stories that seemingly takes five minutes to read. You go back and
reread. The stories exert their spells all over again.”
-Write Now Philly
“A collection of twenty beautifully crafted short stories.”
-NewPages
Lynn Levin is a poet and writer. She is the author of nine books, most recently House Parties, her debut collection of short stories, and the poetry collections The Minor Virtues and Miss Plastique. Levin’s previous books include Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (as co-author) and a translation from the Spanish Birds on the Kiswar Tree poems by Odi Gonzales.
Levin’s poems, short stories, and essays appear widely. She teaches writing and literature at Drexel University and lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
About House Parties
With a deft command of comic distance and abiding compassion for her characters, Lynn Levin in House Parties, her debut collection of short stories, presents us with a broad range of characters who ardently, foolishly, and often with weird invention, relentlessly spar with their fates.
Three friends hike through Yosemite in search of an awe-inspiring waterfall that may or may not exist…a girl on a high-school science trip finds herself abandoned on an island inhabited by aggressive monkeys…a lonely young rabbinical student creates and animates a female form only to see her beloved creature acquire free will…overwhelmed by surveys, an office worker rebels à la Bartleby…a couple believes that a move to a friendly and sophisticated exurban neighborhood will set the stage for happy marriage.
Many of the characters in House Parties see themselves with a certain bemused humor and strive to stay self-possessed even as they struggle against the strange and undeserved things that happen to them. At other times, the characters—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—keep trying to escape the gravity of a plight they created or a problem they refuse to resolve. In observant and generous prose, Levin writes in tones that range from the wry, witty, and hilarious to the lyrical and deeply serious.
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Published by: Spuyten Duyvil.
Release date: May 1, 2023
442 pages | ISBN: 978-1-959556-03-9
Praise for House Parties
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“The stories in House Parties are full of anguished souls and restless hearts, which Lynn Levin examines with the beauty and precision of a poet. I felt the spirit of Poe hovering around these tales, though the sensibility here is entirely modern and original. Levin’s characters search relentlessly—for connection, meaning, even revenge—in ways I couldn’t help but recognize as lifted directly from my life. Wonderful.”
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“Lynn Levin is my favorite kind of writer—honest, specific, real, funny, but never cynical. House Parties is a collection that sees the world with perfect clarity and cherishes it all the same.”
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“These crisply written, sharply observed stories have the surprising hallmark of having mostly gentle, if not outright happy, endings. The turn from dark possibility to lighter conclusion is a welcome relief in our difficult times. Levin affirms something basically positive about the human condition.”
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