Stacey Levine's new novel recounts a pivotal day in the fraught relationship of two orphaned sisters through the eyes of their obsessively observant housekeeper, Girtle. Will Jody be able to cope if her younger sibling Mice, subject to constant harassment in their community for her unusual appearance and habits, leaves home? How will their all-watching companion convey her fierce attachment to them both? As a Greek chorus of local characters cavort and joke their way through a neighborhood party, the sisters and their ardent admirer cross paths with an unsettling stranger--leading to momentous changes for all. Set in southern Florida at the peak of Cold War hysteria, Mice 1961 is a powerful meditation on belonging and separateness, conformity and otherness. Stacey Levine is an American novelist, short story author, and journalist. She has been called "one of the most interesting writers working in America today,a gifted performance artist of literary fiction, part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower, and her writing has been described as "unlike anything else . . . vivid and preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition." Reviewing her 2011 story collection The Girl with Brown Fur, Donna Seaman summed up Levine's writing thus: Stacey Levine ignores lyricism as an evolutionary dead end. Life is fractious and dire, her prose style says; let fiction serve as razor and torch. It’s not that Levine isn’t funny or that she doesn’t forge phrases and sentences of throat-clutching beauty. It’s just that her effort to dissect humankind’s propensity for neuroses, fallacies, and other inanities requires measured drollery and surgical concision.