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From the author of the cult classic Treasure Island!!!, a delightfully unhinged comedy following a woman as she attempts to exorcise the spirit of a dead corgi from her nephew and renegotiate the borders of her previously rational world.
Rose Cutler defines herself by her exacting standards. As an anti-racist, Jewish secular feminist eco-warrior, she is convinced she knows the right way to do everything, including parent her six-year-old nephew Nathan. When Rose offers to look after him while his parents visit Mexico for a week, her brother and sister-in-law reluctantly agree, provided she understands the rules—routine, bedtime, homework—and doesn't overstep. But when Rose's Newfoundland attacks and kills a corgi at the park, Nathan starts acting strangely: barking, overeating, talking to himself. Rose mistakes this behavior as repressed grief over the corgi's death, but Nathan insists he isn't grieving, and the dog isn't dead. Her soul leaped into his body, and now she's living inside him. Now Rose must banish the corgi from her nephew before the week ends and his parents return to collect their child.
With the ferocious absurdity of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch and the dark, brazen humor of Melissa Broder's Death Valley, The Hitch is a tantalizingly bizarre novel about loneliness, bad boundaries, and the ill-fated strategy of micromanaging everything and everyone around you.
"The novel is simultaneously absurd and deeply moving, wise and absolutely, side-splittingly uproarious ... A novel that seems destined to become a cult classic." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Bizarre and mordantly funny ... A vibrant portrait of childhood wonder and adult anxiety." —Publishers Weekly
"[A] hilarious and poignant "what could go wrong?" comedy of outrageous errors and old wounds ... In her second wildly inventive and slyly insightful novel ... Levine uses finely honed and keenly metaphysical comedy to delve into complicated questions about family, friendship, death, grief, and healing." —Booklist
"Levine's writing is filled with snarky interactions and commentary that may provoke readers to reexamine their own beliefs and choices along with Rose ... Recommended for all collections where funny and tongue-in-cheek fiction checks out." —Library Journal
"I was slobberingly, tail-waggingly delighted to read The Hitch—which is one of the most wildly comedic and unhinged novels I have ever encountered, while at the same time also being deeply relatable and strangely emotionally accurate. Not only was I laughing on almost every page, I was reading parts of it aloud to anybody around me who would listen. Give this book a trophy. It's perfect." —Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of All the Way to the River
"A hilarious, madcap novel about our human obsession with getting life 'right,' and how the best laid plans can go astray, especially when the dark haunted soul of a corgi gets involved. This is the book I'll recommend to people as a test of their sense of humor: if they laugh at the corgi, the yogurt crisis, the hero who cannot recognize the obvious even when it's chewing on her pant leg, then I'll know we're destined to be friends." —Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of Wellness
This information about The Hitch was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sara Levine is the author of the novel Treasure Island!!! and the short story collection Short Dark Oracles. Her essays, stories, and aphorisms have appeared in various magazines including The Iowa Review, Nerve, Conjunctions, Necessary Fiction, Sonora Review, and others. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago, IL.
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