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The Bibliophile: The Unyielding Human Voice

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A few notes from John Metcalf, followed by a Biblioasis interview with Elise Levine, author of Big of You

When I happened upon Elise Levine’s stories in 1994 or thereabouts I was editing for Porcupine’s Quill press. What struck me about even her earliest work—and I do mean ‘struck’—was how polished and sophisticated it was; she was aeons ahead of her contemporaries having been reading Beckett at the age of fifteen.

“In his works I find a means with which to capture the psychic and emotional states of betweenness, constraint, defiance, the craft involved in giving shape to the tension between the abjection of self-exile and the unyielding human voice. I grasp how what is not said on the page can speak volumes: how silence itself can render an eloquent and moving subtext, and wrenchingly convey the unspeakable” (Elise Levine, Off the Record, Biblioasis 2023).

She refers more than once—though not directly—to Beckett’s play Not I (1973), a play in which Billie Whitelaw was shrouded entirely in black cloth with only her mouth illuminated—and the spotlit mouth delivered at tumbling speed a flooding monologue. This is the way I hear Elise’s fictions; her stories can be described as instruments performing a voice. She has no patience for plot, for ‘what happens next’; her stories are intricate solos; she wants us not to think but to listen; she demands our surrender to the performance.

John Metcalf

A Biblioasis Interview with Elise Levine

DB: Big of You was my introduction to your work. I loved it so much, I’ve been working my way backwards through your catalogue. I’m curious to know how you see Big of You as being different, or a shift away, from your previous books.

EL: Thank you for the love! Big of You extends what I’ve done in previous books, in which I’ve explored questions about power and voiced-over lives and defiance. I carried these concerns with me in writing Big of You, but I also saw it from the outset as more focused than my first two story collections and at times lighter in tone and more sardonic than my novels and novellas. This book full-on centers ambition, striving, the puncturing of expectations, the capacity for self-deceit, and the delight in potentialities and capabilities. Before I began writing the stories in Big of You, I saw it having a clear overall architecture: I would braid the stories together by linking some of the characters through paired narratives in which the characters appear at different points of their lives or otherwise intersect with the situations and preoccupations of other characters. I knew too, before I began writing any of the stories, that I would lean heavily on fabulist or surreal elements to capture lives lived—or entertaining the possibility of living—beyond imposed expectations, and that these elements would help get at the strange internal weather and sea changes over time that personhood can entail.

Elise Levine. Photo credit: Britt Olsen-Ecker.

Big of You strikes me as primarily character-driven. It’s also very attentive to language, but I imagine largely as a means of representing the peculiarities of character (correct me if I’m wrong). What is it about character that appeals to you? How do you discover and approach a new character? Do you ever find the seeds of character in your own life?

I’ve always been a character-driven writer, and yes, I use language—foregrounding it, even—fully in service of evoking character, because in character lies the Big Question: we have these single lifetimes—as far as I know—and what do we do with them? In view of the dark door of individual extinction we all must pass through. And the possibility, that continues to rapidly feel more pressing, of the extinction of humans as a species, along with every other living thing on this planet. My initial ideas for character strike out of the blue and then I spend time in what I think of as a pre-writing stage: writing partial scenes, especially the opening and endings, and making notes on who the characters might be, what their situation is. Fully developing the character, their story, typically takes me a scandalous amount of time and a crazy number of drafts in which I keep digging deeper, further in, asking what does this character really want, what do they fear? Sometimes characters do initially lift from my own life. I mean, I was once a teenage girl let loose for a summer in Europe, as in the story “Arnhem,” which opens the book. I once lived in an apartment in which the living room was dominated—menaced?—by a baby grand piano, as in “Penetrating Wind Over Open Lake.” But with both of these stories, as was the case with others in which I borrowed details from my own life, when I began writing them in earnest the narratives soon wildly diverged from my personal histories and took on their own beast lives.

Don’t miss Big of You and other great Biblioasis titles on the Globe and Mail’s Fall 2025 books list!

One of my favourite stories in Big of You is the three-part “Cooler.” For those who haven’t read it yet, the first part follows a sad-sack casino worker, the second an isolated spacecraft, and the third part features a grumpy, supernatural creature with a blue tail (these short descriptions really don’t do the story justice). The three sections are wildly different in tone. In a recent interview with The Ex-Puritan, you explain that the story arose from an interest in the concept of “coolness” and how what’s cool might be variously depicted. I love that, and wonder if any of the other stories in Big of You began in distinct ways (even if not necessarily derived from a concept)?

Yes, each of the other stories in the book did begin in distinct ways, but usually with a strong sense of character and situation, and a sense of voice and form. For example, I knew from the outset that for “Return to Forever,” which is about three older women who vacation together in the desert at Joshua Tree, while a fourth friend remains back home in a memory-card ward, I would use the first-person-plural point of view and sweeping, single-paragraph sections to evoke a communal voice. In “Witch Well,” the final story, I knew I wanted, before I even began writing it, to use a heightened fabulist approach and a kind of Stepford Wives vibe—along with a tone of perky defiance—to portray a woman’s grief and confusions over a profound loss against a backdrop of the seductive erasures of affluence.

Read Elise’s new interview with Zilla Jones in All Lit Up.

I mentioned that “Cooler” is one of my favourites in the collection. Do you have a favourite story, or perhaps a character that you still think about with fondness or a sense of kinship?

I do feel a weird tenderness toward the main character in “Once Then Suddenly Later,” Adrien Tournachon, a nineteenth-century historical figure whose older brother, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon—better known by his pseudonym Nadar—is a central figure in the history of early modernity. He was a noted proponent of heavier-than-air flight—which led to the development of airplanes—which he advocated for through a series of catastrophic balloon flights. Along the way he invented aerial photography and air mail and underground photography, and was celebrated for his vivid, individualistic photographic portraits of luminaries such as George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Sarah Bernhardt. But his younger brother, Adrien, my main character, suffers from living in the shadow of his older and successful brother. My character is his own worst enemy: he drinks and squanders his time and lesser talents, at one point steals his famous older brother’s identity, lies about his own whereabouts and stature, and never fails to wallow in bitter self-pity. I don’t feel kinship with him, but I do feel for him: he stands in for the perils of striving to lead an artistic, creative life.

You’ve been a professor for a while now, and you teach in the program at Johns Hopkins University. How do you think teaching writing has influenced your own work?

Teaching fosters the excellent practice of generosity as a reader: it keeps me reading closely, open to a multiplicity of stylistic and formal approaches, and with an admiration and respect for other writers’ willingness to explore the infinite ways of what it means to be human. All of which keeps the creative wheels spinning in terms of my own work. Beyond a doubt, it’s a generative circuit, teaching writing and writing.

Have you read anything lately that you’d like to recommend?

Well, a ton of books! But I’ll try to keep myself decent and mention just a few. The story collections Other Worlds by André Alexis and Hellions by Julia Elliott: both are great examples of using fabulist elements to explore the shifts and surprises of selfhood, and both use language and form in innovative ways. Two Booker-longlisted novels: Audition by Katie Kitamura and Flesh by David Szalay, both of whose previous books I’ve loved. In these latest by Kitamura and Szalay, each very distinct from the other, language and form are nearly electric, and used to pose questions about hairpin twists and turns of identity. Another novel, The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana, I admired for its brilliantly controlled sentences and pacing, its taut and suspenseful narrative and vivid interiority—and its ability to generate tremendous empathy, despite the moral horrors it depicts. I also recommend two poetry collections, also quite different from each other: New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae and Little Mercy by Robin Walter. Both books possess tremendous formal clarity and a just-go-for-it approach to digging deep into what it means to be conscious in this strange world we inhabit, for better or for worse. I habitually read a lot of books in translation and I’ll mention here just one of my favourites (okay, it’s actually a two-fer): On the Calculation of Volume (Books I and II), part of a seven-novel series by Solvej Balle, translated into English from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. These first two in the series offer a lovely, surreal portrait of a woman experiencing suspended time, and uses a circumspect, minimalist tone and style—which achieves a nearly hallucinatory quality through its ultra-grounded and slow-paced approach to revealing the beauty and constancy of the many ordinary details of existence. I can’t wait for the remaining books in the series to come out in translation.

In good publicity news:

  • Four Biblioasis books made the Globe and Mail’s list of “61 books to lose yourself in this fall”:
    • Self Care by Russell Smith: “Smith is still at it in this story of a female journalist whose relationship with a man she’s ostensibly interviewing for an article on incel culture starts crossing into risky sexual and emotional territory.”
    • Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney: “The Irish author’s follow-up to the Booker-nominated How to Build a Boat involves a woman who [returns home] in the wake of her mother’s death and her father’s cancer diagnosis.”
    • Big of You by Elise Levine: “Reading the still criminally underappreciated Levine is a visceral experience that seems to demand engagement of all one’s senses.”
    • Sacred Rage: Selected Stories by Steven Heighton: “[Heighton] believed the short story was his greatest contribution to literature. For this collection, [his editor] Metcalf assembled 15 of what he deems the author’s best.”
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Daily Mail and on FictionFan’s Book Review Blog:
    • Daily Mail: “A furtive, cagey novel reminiscent of Macrae’s Booker-shortlisted gem, His Bloody Project . . . In recounting one murder, Macrae subtly introduces the idea of another to produce a consummate slice of alternative true crime.”
    • FictionFan’s Book Review blog: “Burnet’s writing is wonderful, as always, and diving deeply into complex characters is one of his great strengths . . . Highly recommended.”
  • Russell Smith was interviewed about Self Care on The Commentary podcast.
  • Marcello Di Cintio was interviewed about Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers on the Collisions YYC podcast: “From farms to care homes, Marcello illuminates a hard truth: we rely on foreign labour to survive, yet deny these workers a place to truly belong.”
  • Illustrations from Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories 2025 were featured in the LRC Bookworm.
  • Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was reviewed in Necessary Fiction: “Chadwick’s prose is rich and poetic, containing surprising images and gorgeous complexities . . . leaving the reader hungry to see what the author will do next.”

The Bibliophile: “Arnhem”

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Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

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Elise Levine’s Big of You comes out next Tuesday, September 9 in Canada. I’ve been waiting, with anticipation, for about six months—ever since reading that first story on my work computer between emails—for everyone else in the country to pick up this unsettling, strange, beautiful book.

Big of You ranges across Europe, North America, and space. It includes all sorts of characters, from a mythological, millennia-old creature, to a nineteenth-century inventor and photographer, to a group of older women vacationing in the desert. What I find most stunning about Levine’s writing is her ability to convey the expressive interiority of each character. Tonally, her characters are wildly, humourously, iconically individual. These are some of the realest people I’ve ever encountered in fiction (and by real, I mean so exceptionally unique they border on the surreal).

Below is an excerpt from Big of You’s opening story, “Arnhem.” Coincidentally, this piece also appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2021 (edited by Diane Schoemperlen). I hope you’ll love this one—and the others—as much as I do.

Happy reading,

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

Photo: Big of You by Elise Levine. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

An excerpt from “Arnhem”

My husband leaves—I asked him to, or I didn’t, I can’t keep it straight—and I’m thinking, two girls on a hill. Heidelberg, or Conwy in North Wales where there’s also a castle. Two girls, telepathic as ants, making fast along a wet street. Oxford or Bruges. One girl’s freezing in her white summer dress. The other girl’s clad in army surplus pants and a baggy turtleneck sweater. Both of them seventeen, smug as cats, having blown off the archaeological dig on Guernsey, for which they’d secured positions six months earlier by mail. Mud labour, fuck that shit. On the appointed start date they simply hadn’t shown. Instead they thumb around, do all the things.

In a fancy café in Brussels, they order frites, which arrive on a silver platter, grease soaking into the paper doily. North of Lisbon they sleep on a beach one night. They run out of money in Paris and panhandle, not very well but they get by.

Who do they think they are?

Who did I?

I think we went to the zoo in Arnhem. I think we met a composer at some youth hostel who was from Arnhem. We met two young Italian men at a hostel in Mons. No one else was around and they tried to kiss us near the bathrooms when we went to brush our teeth that night. One of the young men forced one of us against the wall of the repurposed army barracks and thrust his pelvis a few strokes, while the other man stood back with the other one of us and watched. One night in the hostel in Amsterdam there was a phone call for one of us, and we both trundled barefoot down the stairs to the hostel office in our prim cotton nighties. Turns out one of our grandmothers was dying, the grandmother of the one of us who still had a grandmother.

I was the friend. We were friends.

I slept beside her in a roomful of older young women, all of us on cots half a foot off the damp floor. This was Cambridge. Dew on the windows all night, late June. The women were real diggers, by day excavating a nearby pre-Roman site. The men diggers, including my friend’s older brother who we were visiting, and the reason we’d dreamed up the scheme of ourselves volunteering on a site, slept in another large room, down the hall—so much for the men. But the women—solid, practical, tough. Intimidating to the extent that when I say I slept, the truth is I barely did, cold, legs aching, bladder wretched because I was too scared to get up. To be weak. To even think it. Be that person.

Which one was I?

Not the one in the summer dress. The one in the Shetland turtleneck.

*

If I were telling this to my husband, I’d say: the next morning in Mons the sky was clear. Awake for much of the night, my friend and I rose early and packed and picked through the continental breakfast array in the main hall. Individual portions of spreadable cheese wrapped in foil. Crisp rye flatbreads. Ginger jam. I’d never seen anything like it. The Belgian couple who managed the hostel, in their mid-thirties probably, kindly asked how we’d slept. We spilled the beans about the young men and the couple’s eyes grew round and their foreheads pinched. They would have a word with those guys.

By the time the couple did, if they did, and it’s true we believed them, my friend and I were gone.

*

We left Lisbon broke and caught rides up the coast. Mostly guys, some with their own ideas. Sometimes a woman who’d ask if we were okay. We were okay.

*

The beach was small with large-grained sand. We didn’t bother to take our shoes off.

The man who drove us there was slight of build. His mustache was light brown. At dusk he parked on the street and led us down to the water where we thanked him and said goodbye. He’d asked if we wanted to sleep on a beach that night and we’d said yes, please. Anything for an adventure to recall later in life. To say, How cool was that?

The sea frothed at our feet and the air smelled of brine. We toed a few half-circles and the sea erased them. We stretched our backs, yawned. He refused to take the hint. Thank you, okay?

He made himself understood then. He was spending the night with us. He’d called a buddy from the roadside café he’d taken us to earlier, where under his guidance we’d eaten squid in black ink very cheap and drunk cheap wine. Soon his friend would be here to meet us too.

It’s not like the driver had a tent or sleeping bags. Was there even a moon that night? There was a family camping nearby. A woman, a man, a child maybe eight-nine years old. They had a tent. Sleeping bags, no doubt. Judging by the track marks, they’d dragged a picnic table over, and the fire on their portable stovetop burned brighter while the sky grew darker and the man and my friend and I sat on the sand waiting, he for his friend, my friend and I for some notion of what to do, clueless as sheep.

It grew dark-dark. A flashlight made its way toward us. It was the woman. With her nearly no English and our no Portuguese and a little French between us, she ushered my friend and I into the tent with her husband and son.

How did we all fit? I must have slept the sleep of the dead, for all I can remember of the rest of that night.

Check out Elise Levine’s interview with Katherine Abbass in The Ex-Puritan!

*

When we first got together, my husband complained I slept like a swift. When things went from infrequently to occasionally bad to totally the worst between us, he said I slept like a fruit fly.

I pull the covers over my head. He’s not here to stop me, he’s at a friend’s—his, not mine. A week since yesterday. Good thing I brought my phone with me, light in darkness, all that. Especially with the news bulletins the past few days. Will I be okay? Will he? I hit his number and hang up when he answers. He immediately calls back, probably to yell, and I press piss off.

I ferret my arms out from beneath the covers. Stop calling me, I text-beg. Please.

For the next hour, while I still have my phone on, and for the first time in several years, he does as I say.

*

Around midnight I run a bath. I’m thinking again about the beach in Portugal, the family’s tent—the next morning my friend and I woke and stretched and crept back out. The driver lay curled like an inchworm on the sand near the waterline, no friend in sight.

He did drive us back to the highway, game of him. We girls, young women, once again stuck out our thumbs. Auto-stop, they call it there.

I switch off the bathroom light and climb in the tub for a long soak. My phone is still off, but I’ve got it holding down the toilet seat, in case.

My husband is in IT. He’s never once in his life hitchhiked. Like never even tried? No, he said on our first date, dinner at a pasta bar before a movie. Pale noodles, pale sauce, what can you expect for Cleveland, I thought, having recently moved there for the second of what turned into a seemingly endless stream of visiting assistant professor gigs. Before adjunct was what I could get. Now, not even that.

Like not even once? I’d pressured him that night over dinner. Never ever?

My date—who became my husband, at least for awhile, if I understand his intent by hightailing it to a friend’s, if I understand my own intentions—said no in a way that I knew to shut up about it for good.

*

Before he left us that morning by the side of the highway, the Portuguese driver tried to kiss me. I bit his lip to stop him. Where had I ripped that idea from? Some movie or book.

He got mad. Pushed me from him and fingered his mouth. Looked like he was considering options.

Later, in the back seat of our next ride that day—a Spanish couple returning from holiday, non–English speakers—my friend turned to me and said, I thought he was going to hit you. Why on earth would you do that?

I shrugged her off. But I’d also thought he was going to deck me. Some memorable story, one for the ages, something to one day tell the kids.

*

Weeks before Portugal, immediately after the phone call at night to the hostel in Amsterdam—when my friend learned her grandmother had cancer, and might not make it, and I took this news in grave solidarity, assumed a mournful expression that said I understood, I was by my friend’s side forever in all things—we sat on the floor outside our hostel room, nighties tucked around our legs. The old woman. The fights she fought with my friend the raging vegetarian, she of the curly hair she refused to tame. The stubborn fact of the fierce old creature—gone? Weird to think. But I nodded, weird I knew. The previous summer my father had an affair, and my mother told me about it, and now I told my friend about it. How the woman called my mother on the phone and said she and my father were in love. You’re only in love with his credit cards, my mother told the woman.

My friend put her feet flat on the hostel floor and rocked back against the hallway wall, she laughed her ass off. My god, she gasped. What a stupid cliché.

Earlier on the trip, fresh off the plane, well before we’d hit the road thumbs out, we’d stayed in London, and things hadn’t gone so well between us. At Trafalgar Square, on our third afternoon away from home, my friend undertook a spat with me. Talk to me, she semi-shouted. You literally dumb bitch. You need to tell me what you’re thinking, share your thoughts. Otherwise I might as well have left you at home.

The sun is nice today, the sun is too hot. Another beer, why not. Look at that old man over there. In Madrid, I told her I was afraid of morphing into one of the numerous homeless some day. You won’t, she said airily, you have family, friends. This sun is too hot.

Photo: The chapter title page for “Arnhem.” Interior by Ingrid Paulson.

*

I will share this: after my friend’s first suicide attempt, when we were fifteen and she was in the hospital over March break, I declined her single working mom’s invitation to host me at their house so I could help my friend through this difficult period. Instead I went to Myrtle Beach with my parents and little brother. Every afternoon the sib and I rode the Monster, tentacled and huge, at the sleazy mini-fairgrounds down the street from our efficiency motel room. Mornings we crossed the street to the hotel that actually was on the beach and baked in the sun by the heated pool. We swam too, hotfooting across the sugar sand to plunge in the icy waters, before reverse scampering and jumping in the pool to feel our skin burn. What else? I got mild sunstroke on our last day. For six bucks in a tourist shop, I bought my friend a pickled octopus jammed into a small jar.

You bet it was expired. Worse, by fifteen my friend had already gone vegetarian. When I got back home, more red and blistered than tanned, I paid her a visit in the hospital, and presented my gift. The look on her face. The shapeless blue gown, the big bandage around her wrist.

This was before Europe. I had no excuse. It was before my friend told me, that night on the Portuguese beach—sitting on the sand beside the driver who spoke little to no English, waiting for his friend to arrive, and before the family with the tent rescued us, that time in between, when the scope of our situation was beginning to sink in—that I really did not want to lose my virginity this way. Believe her, she knew all about it, having lost hers that spring, in the sleeping bag she’d borrowed from me, so she could go camping with this guy from our history class. He’d been a child actor in popular TV commercials and evolved into a cute teen actor doing same. Years later, years after this night in Portugal, he became a handsome adult actor, with a dimple so deep it nearly cleft his chin, and portrayed a cooped up astronaut in a popular show, and penned screenplays about the world wars, assigning himself the tortured-hero roles.

The night my friend and I slept in the tent in Portugal, I hadn’t heard the ocean waves, though they couldn’t have been more than twenty, thirty feet away. I hadn’t felt the pounding. Like I said: sleep of the dead. Those waves crashing closer, shuffling farther out, and neither my friend nor I possessing a clue about tides.

In good publicity news:

Events

Big of You: Washington DC Launch!

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Come out and celebrate the launch of Elise Levine’s latest short story collection, Big of You! Elise will be joined in conversation by Jeannie Vanasco at Lost City Bookstore, and will be reading from the collection. The event will be hosted by Philip Dean Walker. Books will be available for sale and signing.

The launch will take place on Tuesday, October 21 at 7PM.

More details here.

Grab a copy of Big of You here!

ABOUT BIG OF YOU

In these nine stories, Elise Levine illuminates the aspirations of women and men (and one sassy millennia-old being) as they sift through the midden of their regrets, friendships, and marriages, and seek fresher ways of inhabiting older selves.

Two young women hitchhike around Europe, a lurid secret between them. A team in space is left reeling after a colleague’s unexpected death. Ambitious brothers take to the skies in an aerostat in 19th-century Paris. Big of You contains stories of real and fantastical life, each with its own distinctive voice and wild vocabulary.

At turns playful, blistering, unabashed, these stories examine the nuanced, kaleidoscopic dimensions of character, of people driven by ambition yet contending with the hauntings of the past. Spanning various settings and time periods, Big of You captures the everyday and the extraordinary in collisions soaring and earthy, exuberant and visceral.

ABOUT ELISE LEVINE

Elise Levine is the author, most recently, of Say This: Two Novellas, the story collection This Wicked Tongue, and the novel Blue Field. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, The Walrus, and five times in Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.