“A Book So Red’s linguistic singularities, formal contractions, and world comprised of the existential non-sequitur coalesce into an astonishing aesthetic teratoid: the vacuum-packed denarration. The narrator’s skewed, oblique, and painful relationships teach us the only real comedy is the sound of laughter in the dark all the way down.”

Lance Olsen, author of Theories of Forgetting

“Rachel Levy is a wizard—gory, tender and wickedly funny.”

Noy Holland, author of Bird

“It’s as if Rachel Levy put the carcass of the novel on the butcher block: choice language cutlets remain.”

Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!

“Heartbreaking, horrifying, beautiful and ugly, the narrator of Rachel Levy’s A Book So Red explores her world from the inside out with the precision of a mapmaker. From Munich to an American farm to Berlin and through a cast of characters, the one constant is her miraculous and astonishing voice.”

Myfanwy Collins, author of The Book of Laney

“Rachel Levy, here in what might at first appear to be a pint-sized collection of fractured miniatures, offers us instead heaving-with-feeling fictions that are elliptical and driven by suggestion, though what is most fully and singularly revealed here is a world where much is said—too much, this too might be true—so that what is left unsaid, what the speaker chooses to tell just us—her listeners in this sequence of most private tellings—takes on the heft of a bedside confession.”

Peter Markus, author of The Fish and the Not Fish

A Book So Red was the winning manuscript in the 2014 Caketrain Competition, as judged by Peter Markus.

About the Author

Rachel Levy’s fiction has been published in journals such as The Collagist, Drunken Boat, Everyday Genius, Fence, Gigantic, Pank and Similar Peaks. She lives in Salt Lake City where she is a PhD student at the University of Utah and an administrative fellow for Fiction Collective Two. She was born eight weeks premature.

Acknowledgments

Cover image © Jaz Harold. Used by permission. Portions of this book have appeared (in different form) in Bateau, Cloud Rodeo, The Collagist, Drunken Boat, Fence, Gigantic, Pank, Similar Peaks, Thread Count and Two Serious Ladies. To the editors who selected these works for inclusion: thank you. Special thanks to Heather Cox and Tree Light Books for publishing selections (in different form) in the chapbook Necessary Objects. Text © 2015 Rachel Levy.