"Reading Elise Levine is akin to a wild ride down a dark road at
night.… Bold and startling.…Precipitous and exhilarating."
-Globe and Mail
"One of Canada's finest fiction writers.… Levine demonstrates a
kind of incandescent knowing about human affairs which she deploys
in stunningly nuanced passages.… A sensitive, cagey dominatrix of
literary form and human psychology."
-George Elliott Clarke, Mail Star
"A dazzling wordsmith, a lexical tease, Levine is like a kid let
loose in a leaf pile, kicking up words for the sheer joy of
watching them spin."
-Toronto Star
"A cutting-edge literary sensation."
-NOW
"Audacious.…There's hardly a word in [these stories] that
doesn't weigh heavily, or doesn't have a bristling edge to
it."
-Toronto Star
"Levine's vivid language and unflinching exploration of people
living on the edge of society will stay with you long after each
story is read.…The voices in Driving Men Mad sing as well
as shock.… Levine is unafraid to experiment with language, voice,
and form. Her explorations of humanity and the adventurous spirit
of her work will keep the reader hooked, hesitating to turn the
page but unable to resist the pull of her prose."
-St. John's Evening Telegram
"Levine's writing is adventurous and brave.… Tautly constructed and
rigorously controlled.…"
-Quill & Quire
"Taut and direct, Elise Levine's writing compresses the
distance between art and audience, drawing a reader experientially
through her fiction. Levine is a visceral imagist. Her fiction
renders event indistinguishable from emotion, affecting the gut as
fully as the mind.…The tension that Levine's writing evokes remains
unresolved, extending beyond the page of her fictions."
-Ottawa Citizen
"No reader can make his or her way through these stories and retain
any kind of complacency."
-Calgary Herald
"Levine exposes the roughness and the crude pain of life. It's a
rare writer who can write bluntly about the raw side of life while
subtly leaving room for her readers to make their own, often
disturbing connections."
-Books in Canada