Books

Treasure Island!!!

A young slacker decides to live her life according to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure: “A rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent” (The New York Times).

When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper, gift wrapper, laziest ever part-time clerk at The Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. When had she ever dreamed a scheme? When had she ever done a foolish, overbold act? When had she ever, like Jim Hawkins, broken from her friends, raced for the beach, stolen a boat, killed a man, and eliminated an obstacle that stood in the way of her getting a hunk of gold?

Convinced that Stevenson’s book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. Accompanied by her mother, her sister, and a hostile Amazon parrot that refuses to follow the script, our heroine embarks on a domestic adventure more frightening than anything she’d originally planned. Treasure Island!!! is the story of a ferocious obsession, told by an original voice―“insane, hilarious, and irreverent” (Alice Sebold).

“Treasure Island!!! is outrageous, surprising, frightening, and funny, funny, funny—a hip grandchild of Poe, Nabokov and Peanuts’ Lucy Van Pelt.” — Mark O’Donnell

“Treasure Island!!! is a rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent. Levine has created a quintessential unreliable narrator, one who sees other people’s flaws perfectly and almost never her own.” — The New York Times

“Slightly deranged and marvelous.” — Marcy Dermansky

“[An] irreverent comic novel of self-empowerment.”— O, the Oprah Magazine

Buy at: Amazon | Indiebound | Europa Editions

Short Dark Oracles

Short Dark Oracles is the debut short fiction collection from Treasure Island!!! author Sara Levine. The manuscript was runner-up in the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Deb Olin Unferth.

“This book is a wonder. I laughed out loud early and kept on laughing, sometimes with recognition, sometimes with sheer delight at the precision with which Levine portrays the bafflement of being human and interacting with other humans. Read Short Dark Oracles for yourself and prepare to be both charmed and alarmed.” — Matthea Harvey

“Hemingway said somewhere that he wanted to write like Cezanne painted. In her vivid hyper-real collection, Short Dark Oracles, Sara Levine paints her way into even sharper and more dangerous corners. The fictions are an impasto of primed primary colors, prose that cuts a swath in brilliant swatches of saturated power that pops, punches, turns every turn into a fat flat facet, hard as a side of diamond, steel still-lives, glittering, metallic, distilled. Ernest be damned, I want to write like Sara Levine writes.” — Michael Martone

“Levine’s narrators are self-aware, self-deprecating, sardonic and more than a little funny. ‘The Fainting Couch’ alone is worth the price of admission, but Oracles offers other treasures just as lovely.” — Cooper Renner

“Hilarious and triumphant, these stories will startle you on every page, and on every page you will marvel over Levine’s intelligent, passionate mind.” — Deb Olin Unferth

Buy at: Amazon | Indiebound | Caketrain

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (Signet Classics)

Afterword By Sara Levine

Robert Louis Stevenson’s rousing seafaring classic.

“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

For sheer storytelling delight and pure adventure, Treasure Island has never been surpassed. From young Jim Hawkins’s first encounter with the sinister beggar Pew to the climactic battle with the most memorable villain in literature, Long John Silver, this novel has fired readers’ imaginations for generations. A rousing tale of treachery, greed, and daring, Treasure Island continues to enthrall readers of all ages.

With an Introduction by Patrick Scott and an Afterword by Sara Levine.

Buy at: Indiebound | Amazon

The Broadway Anthology of Short Fiction, 3rd edition

Co-editor; Introduction by Sara Levine

This selection of 45 stories, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Shaun Tan, shows the range of short fiction in the past 150 years. This third edition includes more works from the past 20 years and a greater representation of American authors; new to this edition are works by Katherine Anne Porter, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, Edward P. Jones, Gish Jen, and George Saunders, among others.

Stories are organized chronologically, annotated, and prefaced by engaging short introductions. Also included is a glossary of basic critical terms.

Buy at: Amazon | Indiebound | Broadview Press