SCHOOL: A NOVEL
FC2/University of Alabama Press
October 2023
BUY
Both an exorcism of contemporary academia and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive.
At once angry and jubilant, Ray Levy’s School is a curse on a dying system and an incantation for transforming pain into a vessel for capacious, creative selfhood.
A dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade; a lecture on psychoanalysis delivered as stand-up comedy by a dysphoric graduate student; a review of a found-footage horror movie that’s also a YouTube video of a conference presentation on French theory; an interview with an avant-garde filmmaker that’s really an invocation for conjuring your demon brother; oversharing and withholding, chanting and channeling, School is a slapstick roast of Derrida’s corpse and a mystical vision of a life in which you have not lost.
“Ray Levy's School is a blistering and bitterly funny send-up, lampooning deconstructionism and the academy at large. With crackling wit and exhilarating formal play, Levy has given us a welcome antidote to the toxic culture of (some) graduate degree programs in literary studies."
- Megan Milks, author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Slug and Other Stories
“School is a tour de force of deadpan wit, a delicious détournement in which Levy amusingly mingles (and mangles) various scholarly and cultural archives. Mashing up a range of cult materials (from Bride of Frankenstein to Venus in Furs to The Animal That Therefore I Am), Levy impishly enacts an immanent institutional critique against the cult of intellectual celebrity, the cult of deconstruction, and the cult of academia. It is hard not to feel a shudder of schadenfreude at witnessing Levy’s hilariously clever low blows to high theory. This is cutting-edge academic satire of the highest order.”
- Michael Leong, author of Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry
"There is such pleasure to be found in School, such virulence and cruelty. It's a novel in rituals, a novel to read and reread until you disappear into its demon-ridden thickets of meaning and emerge as anything, a six-headed elk-owl that sings in the voice of Nancy Sinatra, a cenobitic orca, the end of Hegel."
- Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan
NEGATIVE SPACE
Spiral Editions, 2022
Part transition narrative, part anti-interview, part emancipatory and reclamatory manifesto. This emotionally amoebic work takes a broken and collaged together transcribed interview with a friend and generously brings into landscape: writing as friendship and as magic, appropriation and visibility, the material and social stakes of making a gender transition literary, trans isolation and precarity in academia, and the various slippages between writer, text, and character. In conversation with Marquis de Sade, Bob Gluck, and Susan Stryker.
A BOOK SO RED
Caketrain, 2015
“Ray Levy is a wizard—gory, tender and wickedly funny.”
- Noy Holland, author of Bird
“It’s as if Ray Levy put the carcass of the novel on the butcher block: choice language cutlets remain.”
- Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!
Excerpts:
Tarpaulin Sky
NECESSARY OBJECTS
Tree Light Books, 2013
In Necessary Objects, the inanimate items surrounding us are anything but lifeless, anything but ordinary. The staple is what binds two lovers. Icemakers are repurposed to preserve the human psyche, blenders to splice language and “reconcile contradictory desires.” Levy explores our need for objects and our desire for love and acceptance with an unforgettable voice and a narrative energy that is a force to be reckoned with.