Most Of Us Are Here Against Our Will

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 "Things She Never Thought About In Ecaudor," a young woman recently back from the Peace Corps believes that she's the cause of the breast cancer that led to her sister's mastectomy. A 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 son's lover and her husband's 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 an unlikely place - 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 Don't 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. Levinson's talent is as big as the state about which he's writing. I'm a big fan." And Edmund White, of A Boy's Own Story, has called Levinson's world "acetylene hot...There's 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."