Hot Pink [Hardcover]

"The Millions"' and "Flavorwire"'s most anticipated books of 2012.
"Adam Levin's new story collection, 'Hot Pink, ' is about how love--family love, romantic love, love between friends--turns us into people we never thought we'd become. Today you're one person, tomorrow--enter love, and all bets are off. You could turn out to be anybody... Levin is especially adept at capturing the way we sometimes change against our will... In addition to love and lust, there's plenty of havoc in these stories... there's an exuberance here that is absent from safer and too often soulless collections... Life in 'Hot Pink' is raw, messy, yet replete with moments of awkward grace."
--"The New York Times Book Review"
"Readers put off by the enormity of Levin's debut novel, "The Instructions" (which clocks in at over 1,000 pages), can rest easy--this hilarious, tenderly wrought story collection dazzles without the commitment. In the hands of a lesser writer, Levin's vaudevillian cast of characters--like the legless lesbian prodigy of "Considering the Bittersweet End of Susan Falls" or the titular young woman of 'Jane Tell' who enjoys being punched by strangers--may have come across as pat and sensationalistic. But Levin is interested in how language shapes and limits reality, and he deftly uses his ear for voice to elaborate on these ideas. He also possesses a logician's dexterity when it comes to plotting, nimbly anchoring his linguistic concerns to surprising story arcs. In 'Scientific American, ' a financial trader grows increasingly obsessed with determining the reason behind his bedroom wall oozing gel, and in the title story, a self-described Ukrainian "meathead" sees subtext in everything, but laments his inability to gauge words correctly when it matters: 'Like hot pink? For years I thought it was regular pink that looked sexy on whoever was wearing it.' Despite the encumbering instruction-manual frame of 'How to Play The Guy, ' Levin's newest cements his positio

Adam Levin is the author of<I>The Instructions</I>, the winner of the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award. His stories have appeared in<I>Tin House</I>,<I>McSweeney's</I>, and<I>Esquire</I>. Winner of the 2003 Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, he lives in Chicago, where he teaches Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute.<br>