Who We Are
OUR TEAM
Contact Info
Mark Creative Management
Mark Publishing Solutions
1 Little West 12th Street
New York, N.Y. 10014
Tel: 646.747.7120
MOST OF US ARE HERE AGAINST OUR WILL
David Levinson
“Funny, Smart and Inventive” — Mary Gaitskill
“Timeless” — Brett Easton Ellis
About the Book
Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will is a strikingly accomplished debut story collection about love, loss, sex, and survival in the hard heart of Texas. In Jaguar, a young woman recently back from a stint in the Peace Corps believes that she's the cause of the breast cancer that led to her sister's double mastectomy. A wife and mother, mourning the loss of her son by burning the boxes that contained his life, must also come to terms with a visit from her son's lover and her husband's infidelity in Things You Can Expect From Your Loved Ones. In Quite Cold In Alaska, a promising road trip up the California coast turns into a meditation on familial expectation and disappointment when the addled matriarch goes missing. And in the eponymous title story, Most Of Us Are Here Against Our Will, which won an award in The Atlantic Monthly, an hysterical young man, unable to move past a torturous family secret, finds help and solace in a therapy group full of others just like him.
Peopled with reluctant porn stars and directors, failing actors, a misguided cheerleader, a murderous, vengeful writer, and many others, these nine stories are, according to Bret Easton Ellis, "direct, emotional, and compulsively readable." Mary Gaitskill, of Don't Cry and Veronica, has said that "they are about an engaging variety of nuts and sluts, and you actually read them wondering what is going to happen next. Levinson's talent is as big as the state about which he's writing. I'm a big fan." And Edmund White, of A Boy's Own Story, has called Levinson's world "acetylene hot...There's something as raw and frightening and egotistical in these men and women as in Homeric heroes. Read them and love them as much as I do."
About the Author
DAVID LEVINSON is a cultural anthropologist specializing in global issues. His previous publications include the 10-volume Encyclopedia of World Cultures and The Tribal Living Book.