Read an Excerpt from the New Short Story Collection by Celebrated Author Elise Levine

The latest collection of short fiction by Elise Levine is a masterclass from an author that has few equals in the form. Across nine unforgettable stories in Big of You (Biblioasis), Levine captures the beauty and hardship in her characters' lives. Expertly depicting women, men, and even a wry, ancient being, as they confront the weight of memory, friendship, and love while trying to discover their new selves.

From hitchhiking adventures across Europe to the vast isolation of space and the experimental skies of 19th-century Paris, Levine’s worlds hum with energy and tension. Each story carries a fresh voice and fearlessly explores what it means to move forward while being haunted by the past.

Full of disarming tenderness, Big of You showcases Levine’s signature brilliance through language and craft. These stories are intimate and expansive, revealing the fragile, funny, and ferocious ways people search for meaning in the wreckage and wonder of their lives.

We're so pleased to share an excerpt from these collected stories, free for our readers, and right here on Open Book!

Excerpt from Big of You by Elise Levine

From A

It’s the next morning. I summon my strength and call my father’s wife.
It’s your daughter, she tells him, on speaker bedside at the nursing home. Your daughter! Say hi!
Each time she says daughter I lose a piece of my own mind.
He splices together some unintelligible sounds, their own language, one I don’t know.
Dad has a new vocabulary now, his wife says.

I swallow a laugh. It’s been a year—his previous birthday—since I last spoke to him, spoke at him. My guilt has gulped chunks of me and left a gummy residue like tar, but suddenly I feel light, unburdened. The moment I’ve been waiting for: having head-on entered late-stage dementia, he really can’t remember me. Cue the credits.

He gives a good long gargle to clear his throat.
My first born, he growls, some loose line in his brain zipping tight, releasing a trapdoor-heat that yawns in my gut, base-of-my-spine kind of thing.
A shocker—this space I’d never noticed inside me, until now.

How could I? I think, suddenly appalled. Under what terms accept the gift of this anointing. An enlargement, a primal knowledge of how special I am. Might be. Once was.
Knowing I’ll never see him again, I can’t, no way.

After the call I catch a crowded vaporetto and cling to a pole, legs braced as the boat seems to churn up and down rather than forward and across. My first time in Venice. One of my books has been translated by a local university class and published by a local press. As part of a conference, the university has been hosting me for a class visit and launch. Yesterday morning, I tried for sophistication in a fitted black dress and, clutching a glossy scarlet file folder containing bits of paper on which I’d scrawled an overcaffeinated thing or two to say, burbled some jet-lagged and possibly encouraging words at the students. I then stumbled through a lavish lunch, a mini-tour of the city, and awkward aperitivos in company with faculty and conference luminaries, dashing hopes I could impart anything remotely resembling smart bookish gossip, before I fled to my hotel, bailing on further attempts to be someone everyone seemed to want me to be.

Could I be any more tired? From the flight and time change, the overlubricated speechifying of others. My antic, flawed self-performance. But it’s mid-May, with perfect weather for an all-expenses-paid trip to the storied city. I take the bait and hang tight as the water bus motors apparently forth and at each stop people melt on and off. Another moment I’ve been waiting for: blissfully solo and determined to ride to the end of the line. And there disembark, to lose myself among the sinking treasures. Descend into shapeless pre-thoughts, as if tunnelling beneath art-choked, terrazzo-tiled sale and crumbling foundations. Grope through dank water and mouldy substrate to the other side of the dark, sonorous earth, and emerge in a disambiguation of personhood—to skylark, no questions asked or answered half-assed. To simply take in.

Or something like that.

Off the bow of the water bus, racing the sky-blue sky, a hawk. A thin line dangles from its beak. String. Rat-tail. Baby snake.

Late afternoon, I spy you—or a reasonable facsimile thereof—outside the Doge’s Palace. You’re hunched on a bench, unscrolling a map. Or blueprint, it looks like, and I think of honeycombed subterranean chambers stuffed with magnificent loot. I slow. It really is you. Stocky build. Snub nose. Frizzy mane corralled down your back with a hair tie. The shaggy-beast resemblance.

I bite the inside of my cheek, but my surprise feels manufactured, stale. I’ve boredom-googled you over the years. You get around, it’s your thing. Inner Mongolia, the Cape Verde Islands. Nepal, on the first-ever archaeological expedition to employ a local shaman. Some kind of joint project with the Tate Modern I can’t figure out. Lots of European prehistoric and Roman with your Danish-professor spouse.

A damp breeze rustles your chart. You glance up and meet my gaze, and I nearly jump out of my skin. The ground cuts away from beneath my feet, my vision swims, all that—the moment feels unreal, movie time, cue the strings. But I hang on, curious to see what next. Your face, as full-cheeked as in your teens and early twenties, twists with hate. Though it’s been nearly thirty years, I walk on. That’s my thing.

You carry me in your arms. Down and down the steep steps from the cottage your grandfather built, while I flicker in and out of consciousness, geraniums and birches and blue morning sky swiftly growing dark. At bottom you fold me into the back seat of the neighbour’s car for the twelve-mile drive to the hospital, and I can hear the muffled, worried voices of your mother and sister nearby.

I’ve knocked myself out. Pre-breakfast with your sib, my best friend. The two of us fifteen going on seven and thick as thieves, capering about the crooked patio, mostly her chasing sidekick me. I fling myself from her lunging grasp into a rotting wicker chair and upend backward and headfirst onto a stone planter. Get up, shake and sputter until the black wings of tunnel vision sweep me away, and I crash for real.

I come to squashed helplessly against your torso, squeamish at this touch I’ve longed for throughout girlhood, having worshipfully conferred upon you the status of first hot crush. Crush I share with your fierce, fevered sister.

You must be twenty, captivating us with your presence on a rare long weekend off from your summer job stocking shelves at the liquor store back home in our dull burb, before you leave for the rest of the school vacation to tour Scotland, Holland, Sicily, Morocco, Spain. You’ve arranged to volunteer at your first dig, in Yorkshire, excavating pottery, coins, bronze tools, bones—I don’t know whats—for evidence of settlements and trade routes. All spring your sis and I have worked ourselves breathless over your Captain Awesome itinerary.

The head injury is another first: of three concussions I’ll go on to sustain. A mild one. I suffer an afternoon of rest, lightly brain struck. Unleashed from your sister’s hectic, seductive masterminding of our days—a mostly welcome escape from the repetitive chaos of my home life. Free to wend my way through an unabridged Moby Dick in the cool shade of my bottom bunk, forbidden the sunny beach. Beyond the window, sunlight shifts aquatic through green leaves. In my rumpled white sundress, I drowse and wake. My body glassine, a clarion stillness. I am the whale, the words. Call me not Ishmael nor Melville, but by my own mask. My high hopes for the pages I’ll fill.

I’ve already dreamed this future. Sort of dreamed. Ever since I first put crayon to paper, or to the drab walls of our cramped dining room at home—the latter assay followed by my mother’s tears and fury, arms paddling my direction down the hall as she chased me for a good spank. I’d learned to stealth-cover my undertakings, rather than boldly proclaim them. Learned to blame my creations on my poor brother, a defenceless two years younger.

But at age fifteen, solo in my bunk at your family cottage, in the smuggled rest of a semi–sleep paralysis, for the first time I apprehend the certitude—though not the shape or material, not the truths, not yet the complexities—of my owned marks.

And then, that very night, a partying motorcycle gang shows up at the nearby bay front, just a few dirt roads away from this small cabin with no landline—this in the days long before mobiles.

By eleven o’clock your mother and sister and I huddle in silence by the sagging couch in the living room, while you stand guard at the picture window, gripping a splintery tennis racquet, peering without your glasses into the trees.

I feel for you then. Sorry for you. Embarrassed on your behalf. This recalibration, of my take on you, still another first: my recognition that you’ve been thrust into this great-protector role. First born and recently crowned man of the house, given your parents’ recent separation—and now, in this very moment, you’re plunged far deeper than in your morning rescue of me.

Honestly, what can you do if things truly go south?

A rustling of branches. My feet hover above the floor. My flannel nightie, stained with honey and butter and pineapple juice from multiple breakfasts, sways against my legs. The night air strains through the window screens like a living creature rearing tentacles of male laughter and glass breaking, engines revving—infinitely more alarming, and thrilling, than the usual nocturnal visits from raccoons bumping through the outdoors garbage cans for mouldy peaches and chicken bones.

My hair stands on end. I can’t say it’s fear that grips me. Just this rising, a leave-taking. Like nearly falling asleep and knowing it. Another toggling back and forth between worlds.

Suddenly you tip your head toward us, teeth bared. The look—pure rage, as if we’re the enemy—more like a smell, more bitter and chemical than sweat.

Inside me, a headlong shower of dust to dust, space junk. Then my bare toes grasp the hooked rug again, and I lock my knees.

In Venice, outside the Doge’s Palace, I survive my first witness of you in decades—the death-ray you laser in my direction, even though I must be ancient history for you. As your sister—my long-abandoned, former best friend, recently dead of multiple myeloma, according to my recent search-engine searches—is for me. And must be for you, her long-ago hero, the hero she created and held fast to. Your sister who I left. And you left too.

I make it official: I am dead-done for the day.

Another vaporetto ride. Buffeted by the motion, the suffocating afternoon heat, the slither of diesel and canal stench, I slink off at my stop. Aftermath swarms of gold-framed virgins and saints—the entire La Serenissima Rococo sensorium—blitz my brain. Dizzying, these tall ancient buildings on narrow streets. Stone grotesqueries grin at my hairpins, stalk me through reeking people-less alleys that in my distracted state I hadn’t noticed the previous day. Vanished are the tourist-trinket storefronts, eateries with signs promising American-style meals. Instead, piles of bagged garbage, dusty doors, seeming relics of centuries past. For what feels like hours, years, feet blistering in my expensive-folly sandals, I repeatedly end back at the sloppy water.

Is this how my father feels? Or used to, in the early, pre-diagnosis years of his memory malady. When his sense of where and who he was, his inner compass of self-awareness—never his strongest suit, given his lifelong narcissism, his inconstant moral acuity—hadn’t wholesale deserted him. This self-vacating—is it coming for me? Already here? Given my history of head bangs, and scrupulous inattentions to dull everydayness—rehearsed until second nature—that conjure an away-ness I’ve come to rely on.

A taste of what’s to come. A paying of the price.

For real, though—how lost can I be? I mean, come on. The map app on my phone might be useless among the warren of heritage footpaths, but I’m not brain-dead yet. I hope.

I bear down, as if reassembling each neural cell one by one, and creep each elbow turn and flare that leads inward from the canal. Until, legs trembling and with shredded heels, I crook around a corner and my hotel appears—not where I expected it to be, but opposite, in an inverse mirror image of the picture I’d held in my head.

I reach the hotel door. Sweat shivers from me. I reach for the ornate handle with my free hand, and it hoves into view, a chalk-white curio, an ancient find fished from unknowable depths—just as the youngish French translator from Lyon, who I’d met yesterday at the conference, is stepping out.

He blocks my entry, lifts his chin toward me. You again, he says.

I slip my sweat-slicked phone into my tote. Raise both hands toward my face and make a show of examining my lined palms, as if I were some dodgy chirologist. Turn my very middle-aged mitts over and scrutinize the well-established liver spots, the pronounced veins, their own twisty map. Yes, very middle-aged. Guess so, I say.

He flicks an arched brow and struts off in his unwrinkled linen trousers and crisp white shirt.

Seated next to me at yesterday’s lunch for twelve, he installed his hand on my knee without breaking stride in trumpeting his recent fancy-pants publications and august awards. I spooned more risotto into my mouth, polished my glass of wine. I smiled. It wasn’t so hard. Nor did I experience a hardship in imagining his tongue in my mouth—trying the idea on for size. Take him for a spin? But I sat tight, not unable, but at bottom unwilling to decide yes or no. Why make the effort? I hadn’t made the first move or next move, I’d made no moves, I was empty of the faintest interest in the shopworn trope, the hardly fresh experience of having some guy in a professional setting overstepping in my direction. I found myself pleasantly devoid of desire. Unpossessed by a flicker of interest in thinking more about me, me, what about me?

What about me? What did I want, what would I do.

The translator continued to hold forth while he inched his paw to my thigh, until our server removed our plates, and briefly tongue-tied the young Frenchman by proffering dessert. I couldn’t care less. About any of it. The pleasure in my freedom from care deserted me, and I couldn’t for the life of me be more impossibly, fatally tired. From the demands of this trip. From tired-ass me.

Do not get me wrong. I often dwell in this bleached territory of the soul. Slip into it when, somewhere in the wild woolly middle of a project, I can see the glorious or—more usually—inglorious end but can’t figure how to get there. How to fit the parts together. Make them track. Every accursed time the same: my method requires me to shrink, increasingly wraith-like, humiliated, prostrate before a once-scintillating, now-become-shaky idea. In danger of vanishing into a terror of never finishing, sucked alive into a mega fail.

Where I am now, with this new story on my hands. This very one. And truly—truly—it’s killing me.

(Excerpted from “From A” in Big of You by Elise Levine, published by Biblioasis, 2025. Reproduced with permission from the publisher.)