[5] “Levine’s prose is compelling and intriguing and risky,” wrote the Review of Contemporary Fiction,[6] while Exquisite Corpse noted: “Because something very similar to this once happened to you, you should read this book.

There is a secret for your eyes only inside.’’[7] Levine’s first novel, Dra— (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), “turns that most banal of activities, the search for a job, into a nightmarish pilgrimage of regression and lost selfhood.” It was praised as “both haunting and laugh-out-loud funny,” for its "beautiful, arresting prose," and for the author’s ability to “put the emotional violence of human relations under a high‑power microscope.”[8] Publishers Weekly claimed it combined “the dreamlike pace of Alice in Wonderland, the darkly comic tones of a Kafka novel, and a landscape reminiscent of 1984.”[9] Frances Johnson, Levine’s second novel (Clear Cut Press, 2005), is set in Munson, a fictional Florida hamlet where “a volcano seethes on the outskirts of town, strange animals skitter in the shadows, and a dense brown fog has settled overhead.

The story follows Frances’s mounting restlessness, as she must decide whether to take control of her life or cede it to the murky future the community has designated for her.”[10] The Believer described the novel as “a comedy of manners,” and discerned “an inkling of Austen in Levine’s delicate and deadpan assault on our culture’s heterosexist, heterogeneous dictates.

is crystalline and intensely elegant, often at comic odds with the terse speech of the characters themselves.”[12] Couched within Levine’s “strange fables,” wrote Kristy Eldredge, are “recognizable hurts and self-defeating desires.

The way she writes about such things is what makes her fiction the elegant, precise and transcendent wonderland it is.”[13] Reviewing Levine’s third novel, Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press, 2024), in the Washington Post, Lydia Millet highlighted “something singular to Levine’s writing: a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I’ve never seen anywhere else” that elicited from her “a startled, delighted laughter.”[14] Alvin Lu called it “a subtly observed novel of manners, a cross between Jane Bowles and Jane Austen” couched in “remarkable language,”[15] while Garielle Lutz has stated that “Mice 1961 is as enchanting a novel—and as excitingly original, as tunefully phrased, and as discomposingly hilarious—as anything I can ever hope to read.

She also wrote the libretto for a puppet opera, The Wreck of the St. Nikolai, with music by Lori Goldston (cello) and Kyle Hanson (accordion) and mis-en-scene by Eve Cohen and Curtis Taylor,[18] which was staged in Seattle by On the Boards in 2006.