Say This: Two Novellas - Paperback

by Elise Levine (Author)

Two crystalline novellas linked by one devastating crime: Say This is an immersive meditation on the interplay between memory, trauma, and narrative.

It's a cold spring in Baltimore, 2018, when the email arrives: the celebrity journalist hopes Eva will tell him everything about the sexual affair she had as a teen with her older cousin, a man now in federal prison for murder. Thirteen years earlier, Lenore-May answers the phone to the nightmare news that her stepson's body has been found near Mount Hood, and homicide is suspected. Following Eva's unsettling ambivalence towards her confusing relationship, and constructing a portrait of her cousin's victim via collaged perspectives of the slain man's family, these two linked novellas borrow, interrogate, sometimes dismantle the tropes of true crime; lyrically render the experiences of grief and dissociation; and brilliantly mine the fault lines of power and consent, silence, justice, accountability, and class. Say This is a startling exploration of the devastating effects of trauma on personal identity.

Author Biography

Elise Levine is the author of the story collection This Wicked Tongue, the novels Blue Field and Requests and Dedications, and the story collection Driving Men Mad. Her work has also appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Blackbird, The Gettysburg Review, and Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Baltimore, MD, where she teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.