At once as beautifully written and equally disturbing as any Alice Munro story, the characters in this collection are always pushing toward redemption even while they find themselves in the process of self-destructing.

Full of unbridled suspense, each one of these stories is a mystery waiting to be savored and unraveled.

In “Things She Never Thought About In Ecuador,” a young woman recently back from a stint in the Peace Corps believes that she’s the cause of the breast cancer that led to her sister’s double mastectomy.

A wife and mother, mourning the loss of her son by burning the boxes that contained his life, must also come to terms with a visit from her son’s lover and her husband’s infidelity in “Things You Can Expect From Your Loved Ones.” In “Quite Cold In Alaska,” a promising road trip up the California coast turns into a meditation on familial expectation and disappointment when the addled matriarch goes missing.

And in the eponymous title story, “Most Of Us Are Here Against Our Will,” which won an award in The Atlantic Monthly, an hysterical young man, unable to move past a torturous family secret, finds help and solace in a therapy group full of others just like him.

Peopled with reluctant porn stars and directors, failing actors, a misguided cheerleader, a murderous, vengeful writer, and many others, these nine stories are, according to Bret Easton Ellis, “direct, emotional, and compulsively readable.”

From the reviewers:

“David Samuel Levinson is a young writer who has mastered all the elements that make up a classically structured short story: drama, suspense, humor, empathy. There are no fancy pyrotechnics or meta-fictional devices here. He’s a neo-traditionalist so the stories are direct, emotional and compulsively readable, plus there’s enough mystery and action in them to propel at least a dozen novels. These stories, about families and lovers and loss and surviving, make a reader wonder why we haven’t heard from Levinson ages ago–they feel that timeless and essential.” ⇾ Bret Easton Ellis

“David Samuel Levinson’s stories are funny, smart and inventive; they are about an engaging variety of heartbreakers and the heartbroken, and you actually read them wondering what is going to happen next. Like Salinger’s motley cast of characters, the stories in Levinson’s collection are always surprising and haunting to the very last word.” ⇾ Mary Gaitskill

“These gutsy, engaging stories introduce a voice in American fiction from which we are destined to hear more in the future. They are elegant, swift, sometimes heartbreaking, always–in the best sense of the word–surprising: stories to re-read, and to pass on.” ⇾ David Leavitt

“David Samuel Levinson’s world is acetylene hot. His characters may be wearing designer clothes, but they’re about to slug it out like their Texas forbears. There’s something as raw and frightening and egotistical in these men and women as in Homeric heroes. Theirs are not lives of quiet desperation but of sudden vituperative violence.” ⇾ Edmund White

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