Following graduation from Yale University in 1977, Levi received a Mellon Fellowship to study at Clare College, Cambridge, where he revived the literary magazine Granta with Bill Buford and Pete de Bolla, and served as U.S. Editor until 1987.

[3] After premiering in New York, the production toured the United States including performances at Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and The Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Levi's latest novel, Septimania, released in April 2016 by Overlook Press, follows a shy young organ tuner who falls in love with a mysterious math genius, Louiza, only to find she has disappeared.

Over the next 50 years, Malory’s search for Louiza leads to encounters with Aldo Moro, Pope John Paul II, a band of lost Romanians, a magical Bernini statue, Haroun Al-Rashid of Arabian Nights fame and an elephant that changes color, a shadowy U.S. spy agency and one of the 9/11 hijackers, an appleseed from the original Tree of Knowledge and the secret history of Isaac Newton and his discovery of a Grand Unified Theory that explains everything.

Jen Baker at Booklist gave Septimania a starred review, calling it "a literary dream of a book" and "a storyteller's work of magic, and a fantastically suspenseful adventure" and compares it to Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen.