Sara Levine is the author of the novels The Hitch and Treasure Island!!! and the short story collection Short Dark Oracles. She earned a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Brown University and was awarded a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities.
Levine teaches creative writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and on Substack at Delusions of Grammar.
At Electric Lit she tagged seven novels that "celebrate reckless speed, dizzying intensity, audacious rudeness, and the abandonment of social norms." One title on the list:
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah SmithRead about another title on the list.
The Vegetarian (ch’aesikchuŭija, translated into English by Deborah Smith) centers on a Korean housewife who abruptly stops eating meat. Told in threesections, the novel is full of surprises, partly because it’s told from three points of view, none of which belongs to the vegetarian herself. Yeong-hye’s husband, a loveless man who views his wife as “completely unremarkable in every way,” begins the story of his recalcitrant wife, but his contribution can’t explain her motives, only document his growing fury that she resembles a “hospital patient” and no longer wears a bra or willingly provides sex. The second part documents her brother-in-law’s erotic obsession with her, even as Yeong-hye descends into psychosis and physically wastes away. The third part turns to her sister, In-hye, a hard-working, well-organized mother who is appalled, for her own reasons, at her sister’s transformation. We’ve all read books about women suffering under patriarchy, but has any protagonist ever responded to the violence by willing herself to become a tree?
The Vegetarian is among Kate Hamilton's eight books about complicated desire, Monika Kim's five best body horror novels, Adam Biles's top ten allegories, M. S. Coe's eleven titles about women on the brink, and Amy Sackville's ten top novels about painters.
--Marshal Zeringue
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