Finalist: Mice 1961, by Stacey Levine (Verse Chorus Press)

Mice 1961 recounts a pivotal day in the fraught relationship of two orphaned sisters through the eyes of their obsessive lodger/housekeeper. How will Jody cope if her younger sibling Mice, bullied and belittled in their community for her unusual appearance and habits, leaves home? How can their all-watching companion bond herself irrevocably to the sisters? When an unsettling stranger arrives, all three women are driven toward momentous change.

“Levine . . . is a gifted performance artist of literary fiction — part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower. As the waves from Mice’s radios might travel for ages through the vacuum of space, or the arms of some forgotten creature stretch up from the shadows in the vain hope of a kind embrace, so does this exceptional novel offer itself for our delectation — a tender morsel of rue, a jig of human error.”—Lydia Millett, Washington Post

“Peculiar, vivid, preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition, Stacey Levine’s fiction is unlike anything else. Mice 1961 is terrific.”—Kelly Link

“Like a great cinematographer, Stacey Levine lights the world, transforming mundane reality into something beautiful and strange. The proportions change with the light: the tiny becomes monumental, the outsized folds into an overnight bag, and a domestic drama encompasses the wonder and freakishness of being alive.”—Nate Lippens

“Mice 1961 is as enchanting a novel—and as excitingly original, as tunefully phrased, and as discomposingly hilarious—as anything I can ever hope to read. Few writers are ever this alive to language and this tender toward the lot of the vividly different among us. I am in awe.”—Garielle Lutz

“Mice 1961 has notes of Carrington and Oates and Coover. I was captivated by its sibling stars and even more by Levine’s syntactical dazzlements. She sculpts every sentence.—JoAnna Novak