Black Vodka

Description: 'Elisa said Yes and I said Yes. We said Yes in all the European languages. Yes. We said yes we said yes, yes to vague but powerful things, we said yes to hope which has to be vague, we said yes to love which is always blind, we smiled and said yes without blinking.' ('A Better Way to Live') ----------- How does love change us? And how do we change ourselves for love - or for lack of it? Ten stories by acclaimed author Deborah Levy explore these delicate, impossible questions. In Vienna, an icy woman seduces a broken man; in London, a bird mimics an old-fashioned telephone; in adland, a sleek copywriter becomes a kind of shaman. These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humour and curiosity, stories about what it means to live and love, together and alone.

Review: 'These tales of unconventional love reinforce Levy's reputation as a major contemporary writer who never pulls her punches.' The Independent ----------- 'Metropolitan and knowingly sophisticated.' Sunday Times ----------- 'These ominous, odd, erotic stories burrow deep into your brain.' Financial Times ----------- 'A collection of mischievous vignettes of Mitteleuropa.' The Telegraph ----------- 'Like their protagonists, these stories are powerful because they are fragmentary, elliptical.' The Guardian ----------- 'Levy's pen is a volatile weapon.' The Observer ----------- 'Levy sensitively conveys the phenomenology of textures, of skin and breath. Embedded in her coiled, polished sentences is the drive that pushes us together, and forces us apart.' Times Literary Supplement



Prizes: Short-listed for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award 2016 and Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award 2013.

Author Biography: Deborah Levy is a British playwright, novelist and poet. She is the author of six novels, Beautiful Mutants (1986); Swallowing Geography (1993); The Unloved (1994); Billy & Girl (1996); and Swimming Home (2011), which was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize as well as the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize. Levy's short stories, Black Vodka (2013), were shortlisted for the BBC International Short Story Award and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. She has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC. Her latest novel, Hot Milk, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.