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Short Dark Oracles
Short Dark Oracles is the debut short fiction collection from Treasure Island author Sara Levine. The manuscript was runner-up in the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Deb Olin Unferth.
118 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2011
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447 people want to read
About the author
Sara Levine
11 books94 followersHi! My novel THE HITCH is available for pre-order now and will be published January 13, 2026.
I am also the author of the novel TREASURE ISLAND!!! and the short story collection SHORT DARK ORACLES.
If you haven't read Robert Louis Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND, I recommend the Penguin's Mass Market paperback which includes my Afterword.
Sign up for my newsletter at
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I am also the author of the novel TREASURE ISLAND!!! and the short story collection SHORT DARK ORACLES.
If you haven't read Robert Louis Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND, I recommend the Penguin's Mass Market paperback which includes my Afterword.
Sign up for my newsletter at
https://delusionsofgrammar.substack.com/
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
January 16, 2014
Caketrain is quickly becoming one of my favorite independent publishers. In 2011 they released this wonderful collection of ten short works of fiction by author Sara Levine - stories with emotional depth and dark comedic moments. I especially appreciated Levine's deft hand in writing dialogue - those scenes are written with a fine distillation that includes everything that needs to be said, nothing more.
"Baby Love" was my favorite of the group - after finishing the collection I researched the author and read that this particular story resonated with her the most. You can see that in the writing. Any parent that has watched a child grow up quickly, too fast, will relate to the beautiful final paragraph of the story.
Levine has convinced me that she is something special and to be read further. I've purchased her novel "Treasure Island!!!" for further investigation.
Recommended.
July 24, 2011
Outstanding, outstanding, outstanding. Exceptionally written, imaginative, often hilarious. One of the smartest books I've read in recent memory.
November 11, 2020
3 stars? 4 stars? I dunno. As with many collections, I thought some stories were much better than others.
February 12, 2022
I was originally supposed to erase this one from my e-reader, but I accidentally opened it instead and I was intrigued by the opening phrase "He was telling her about his psychic powers" so I decided to give it a go after all.
Typical creative-writing-class stories, most of them about dating or people with several neuroses, going absolutely nowhere except for "Look, isn't this sort of a weird situation?" The only reason it's getting a 2 star rating from me instead of 1 is because I really liked the stories "A Promise" and the titular "Short Dark Oracles". Short Dark Oracles, in particular, was both lots of fun and memorable, and I've caught myself thinking about it since I finished it.
Typical creative-writing-class stories, most of them about dating or people with several neuroses, going absolutely nowhere except for "Look, isn't this sort of a weird situation?" The only reason it's getting a 2 star rating from me instead of 1 is because I really liked the stories "A Promise" and the titular "Short Dark Oracles". Short Dark Oracles, in particular, was both lots of fun and memorable, and I've caught myself thinking about it since I finished it.
April 20, 2012
Sara Levine's "Short Dark Oracles" is a great little book of stories. Short enough to read in a single afternoon (or about two plays of M83's album "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming" depending on how fast you read), there are peaks and valleys in these stories. It is just like any short story collection: you have some of those stories you like, some you don't like, and some you just don't get. There is more of the third category in this collection, but this does not put a damper on this collection. The end confusion seems sometimes more like a David Lynch type, happy confusion than a "I just wasted my time on this shit" type of confusion.
I could get into how I liked these stories, how "Short Dark Oracles" is funny and clever and some of the little sentences that really didn't mean much to the story really stick. An example is in the title story, "Must be a kind of sport," said another assistant vice president whose eye fell on drug paraphernalia stashed in the chimney. The pipe appeared perfectly good, so he slipped it into his pocket."p. 41 The end of this paragraph, with the slipping of the pipe into his pocket lets us know that everyone in Sara Levine's collection has something he or she is hiding, a flaw in everyone's character that is expressed in such a natural way in all of these stories. This is a talent that many writers do not achieve. In one sentence, she can let the reader know almost everything about her characters. This alone makes "Short Dark Oracles" a great experience.
I could get into how I liked these stories, how "Short Dark Oracles" is funny and clever and some of the little sentences that really didn't mean much to the story really stick. An example is in the title story, "Must be a kind of sport," said another assistant vice president whose eye fell on drug paraphernalia stashed in the chimney. The pipe appeared perfectly good, so he slipped it into his pocket."p. 41 The end of this paragraph, with the slipping of the pipe into his pocket lets us know that everyone in Sara Levine's collection has something he or she is hiding, a flaw in everyone's character that is expressed in such a natural way in all of these stories. This is a talent that many writers do not achieve. In one sentence, she can let the reader know almost everything about her characters. This alone makes "Short Dark Oracles" a great experience.
April 20, 2012
I wanted to like this book more, but it just didn't work out.
Poetry in this country has been destroyed by MFA programs, which produce poets and work which are only read by other MFA professors and students—can only possibly be read by other MFA professors and students, because that is the only audience sufficiently trained in its arcane rules of self-regard to understand what's being attempted. The poets take their small audiences as a badge of honor! I am not part of that world and I don't want to be; I refuse to support it, and that includes reading it.
Now prose writing seems to be following poetry into the same quicksand: MFA-trained writers produce work that is new and interesting only when read in the context of what some other MFA-trained writer produced last year. Work that does not even attempt to engage a wide readership, because its authors have never experienced one and wouldn't know how to deal with one if it found them.
Now, I love when authors play with language and narrative structures, because I think that our abilities to speak and tell stories are central to what makes us human, and thinking about how they work and affect the rest of our lives is not only a lot of fun but can actually change those lives. I appreciate that language and narrative play are fun for their own sakes—I make puns, for instance—but I don't pretend that play has some larger meaning, holds any interest for other people: it has to be brought into significance by other means. Even if the significance—the "point" of your writing—is actually something about language itself, you have to make that point against a context of some existing common understanding of what language does. And when your only readers are your MFA cohort or your peers at the MFA program down the road, the size of that context shrinks to a couple dozen of your friends, to the point where the word "publishing" loses all practical meaning. The only people who can read such work are the people who helped you create it.
So: Sara Levine likes to play with language and narrative structures, and sometimes it's great—hence 3 stars. But sometimes I don't get the point at all.
I first heard about Levine in pre-release hype for her novel Treasure Island!!!, which I'm in the middle of and really enjoying. That book is published by a small but mainstream press, Europa Editions (under its Tonga imprint, which is curated by Alice Sebold—now there's mainstream readership for you). Whereas I got Short Dark Oracles from its publisher, Caketrain, which produces a journal and a couple of chapbooks annually full of this kind of writing: they've been around for 10 years but they're small, they don't have distribution, you gotta find out about them through word of mouth. Or through your MFA program.
And that's the risk with this kind of writing and publishing, even if an "outsider" like me manages to discover it: that it'll be part of that insular MFA world and its goals—and hence whether it succeeds or fails—will be opaque to anyone who doesn't already know the secret. To anyone, effectively, who's not already a friend of the author.
Levine has some great stuff here: "A Promise" is a fantastic story of a young mother who decides she can fight Fate, and goes about it in an unusual way. She has a unique voice, her character develops and changes, and the story concludes in a way that opens out into a larger context which can include the reader. Aside from its unusual events, "A Promise" is actually a pretty traditional story with a linear structure—and it succeeds on the terms traditional stories have done for centuries. "The Good Woman" is a short-short (2 pages) which works similarly: a sequence that gets exaggerated and escalated until an unexpected end. "Baby Love" does that and more, because that unexpected end is expressed in a gorgeous image:
But then there's "For the Floor," which is told in the second person and inventively substitutes "_______" for your lover's name. _______ is a bad match with no consideration for your life, but you're drawn to him anyway. This mismatch is expressed in various scales and contexts—and then the story stops. Sure, that section happens "after you break up," which explains the stopping—but the characters are no different and the story has no conclusion: it's just a collection of events with an arbitrary-feeling sequence imposed on them. "The Following Fifteen Things" works the same way, except its end-event is a firing, not a breakup.
And then there's the title story, "Short Dark Oracles," which is longer than any two other stories combined, taking up the middle third of the book. Alex has been fired and can't find another job, so his friends Cy and Sonya suggest he consult an oracle. The oracle's statement seems to be about sex, so Cy and Sonya direct Alex to their friend Amelia and her fiancé Richard, and several varieties of inconclusive sex ensue. Alex keeps going back to the oracle. Amelia and Richard get married at the zoo, and then the story ends thus:
Sara Levine got her MFA at [thus-n-such] and now teaches in the MFA program at [whoop-de-doo]. But I sure as hell hope that's not the entire context of her writing career, because she can be better than that.
Poetry in this country has been destroyed by MFA programs, which produce poets and work which are only read by other MFA professors and students—can only possibly be read by other MFA professors and students, because that is the only audience sufficiently trained in its arcane rules of self-regard to understand what's being attempted. The poets take their small audiences as a badge of honor! I am not part of that world and I don't want to be; I refuse to support it, and that includes reading it.
Now prose writing seems to be following poetry into the same quicksand: MFA-trained writers produce work that is new and interesting only when read in the context of what some other MFA-trained writer produced last year. Work that does not even attempt to engage a wide readership, because its authors have never experienced one and wouldn't know how to deal with one if it found them.
Now, I love when authors play with language and narrative structures, because I think that our abilities to speak and tell stories are central to what makes us human, and thinking about how they work and affect the rest of our lives is not only a lot of fun but can actually change those lives. I appreciate that language and narrative play are fun for their own sakes—I make puns, for instance—but I don't pretend that play has some larger meaning, holds any interest for other people: it has to be brought into significance by other means. Even if the significance—the "point" of your writing—is actually something about language itself, you have to make that point against a context of some existing common understanding of what language does. And when your only readers are your MFA cohort or your peers at the MFA program down the road, the size of that context shrinks to a couple dozen of your friends, to the point where the word "publishing" loses all practical meaning. The only people who can read such work are the people who helped you create it.
So: Sara Levine likes to play with language and narrative structures, and sometimes it's great—hence 3 stars. But sometimes I don't get the point at all.
I first heard about Levine in pre-release hype for her novel Treasure Island!!!, which I'm in the middle of and really enjoying. That book is published by a small but mainstream press, Europa Editions (under its Tonga imprint, which is curated by Alice Sebold—now there's mainstream readership for you). Whereas I got Short Dark Oracles from its publisher, Caketrain, which produces a journal and a couple of chapbooks annually full of this kind of writing: they've been around for 10 years but they're small, they don't have distribution, you gotta find out about them through word of mouth. Or through your MFA program.
And that's the risk with this kind of writing and publishing, even if an "outsider" like me manages to discover it: that it'll be part of that insular MFA world and its goals—and hence whether it succeeds or fails—will be opaque to anyone who doesn't already know the secret. To anyone, effectively, who's not already a friend of the author.
Levine has some great stuff here: "A Promise" is a fantastic story of a young mother who decides she can fight Fate, and goes about it in an unusual way. She has a unique voice, her character develops and changes, and the story concludes in a way that opens out into a larger context which can include the reader. Aside from its unusual events, "A Promise" is actually a pretty traditional story with a linear structure—and it succeeds on the terms traditional stories have done for centuries. "The Good Woman" is a short-short (2 pages) which works similarly: a sequence that gets exaggerated and escalated until an unexpected end. "Baby Love" does that and more, because that unexpected end is expressed in a gorgeous image:
In place of my feelings, substitute the emptiness of a rain barrel, its wood drying out, its metal staves creaking, an arid silence after two years of learning to hold the rain.You don't have to be an MFA student to get the power of that.
But then there's "For the Floor," which is told in the second person and inventively substitutes "_______" for your lover's name. _______ is a bad match with no consideration for your life, but you're drawn to him anyway. This mismatch is expressed in various scales and contexts—and then the story stops. Sure, that section happens "after you break up," which explains the stopping—but the characters are no different and the story has no conclusion: it's just a collection of events with an arbitrary-feeling sequence imposed on them. "The Following Fifteen Things" works the same way, except its end-event is a firing, not a breakup.
And then there's the title story, "Short Dark Oracles," which is longer than any two other stories combined, taking up the middle third of the book. Alex has been fired and can't find another job, so his friends Cy and Sonya suggest he consult an oracle. The oracle's statement seems to be about sex, so Cy and Sonya direct Alex to their friend Amelia and her fiancé Richard, and several varieties of inconclusive sex ensue. Alex keeps going back to the oracle. Amelia and Richard get married at the zoo, and then the story ends thus:
Amelia and Richard walked arm in arm, looking happy, but not particularly just married. They might have been coming out of a bar, thought Alex, or a show.WTF? I mean, huh? What does that have to do with anything in the previous 30 pages? What does that tell me about Alex, or the oracle, or meaningless bizarre sex? It's hard to take it as anything other than an inside joke, and it sours the whole story for me.
"Oh, well," Richard said. "I've seen bigger sea lions than that."
Sara Levine got her MFA at [thus-n-such] and now teaches in the MFA program at [whoop-de-doo]. But I sure as hell hope that's not the entire context of her writing career, because she can be better than that.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 20, 2011
This is a powerful set of stories coming at questions of self-invention in a number of ways. In one story it's an unflattering past haircut (and the mother responsible for it) by which a character defines herself, clinging perhaps self-indulgently to that ugly identity even when it is upstaged by the ability of those around her to rise above their own damaged bodies. In others characters know themselves by the presence, absence, and discomfort of their own children, or (in the title story) by the apocryphal stories they invent for and project onto other people as an escape from their own anxious lives, without regard for the consequences and potential damage of those projections. In probably my favorite story, "Baby Love" (which, full disclosure, I had the privilege of editing and publishing), this social dimension allows Levine to give us not only the tight domestic sphere of a couple whose lives are changed by a baby, but gives us that couple in a nest of cultural assumptions about parenthood, class, and identity with that baby as the center. Overall, I was impressed by the way these characters and their flexible lives aren't insular but social, giving the stories a sense of consequence and complication rather than treating identity as something that can be crafted in isolation without impacting others and as if characters live in a box apart from the world—a dimension that, for me, is too often absent in this style of tightly-focused, slightly surreal urban fiction, so makes these stories stand out.
January 5, 2012
Sara Levine is a writer who thinks beautifully, who with a little turn of phrase takes you outside the logic with which you are comfortable, and exposes the inner working of her fictional world to the reader. Reading this collection is like looking out your window, and instead of seeing the scenery, you see the fabric from which the scenery is woven. The stories are written with the perfect ratio of mirth ("So there I was, with this friend of mine who was not a friend but who behaved like a friend since I had failed to inform her of our troubled relations.") to melancholy ("In place of my feelings, substitute the emptiness of a rain barrel, its wood drying out, its metal staves creaking, an arid silence after two years of learning to hold the rain."), which for me is one of the most rare and rewarding combinations in literature. I think the reason the book stuck with me so much was that it rendered the weird with such precision and clarity. Even the oddest event is perfectly real and believable.
I'm excited to read more of Levine's work, and fortunately, her novel, Treasure Island!!!, has recently been published.
I'm excited to read more of Levine's work, and fortunately, her novel, Treasure Island!!!, has recently been published.
July 24, 2024
This is a quick (120 pages) short story collection, from the woman who wrote Treasure Island!!!, one of the funniest books I've ever read. She published both of these books in 2011, and hasn't published another book since, which is tragic.
This collection, like most short story collections, is erratic. But at its best, the writing here reminds me of George Saunders (when he's feeling optimistic, which is my favorite Saunders), with a healthy dose of Charles Portis' deadpan, and a dash of Kelly Link's inexplicable weirdness. I zipped through this collection, and just re-read a chunk of it again when I sat down to scratch out these notes. Really enjoyed, someone find Sara Levine and force her to keep writing. Four stars.
This collection, like most short story collections, is erratic. But at its best, the writing here reminds me of George Saunders (when he's feeling optimistic, which is my favorite Saunders), with a healthy dose of Charles Portis' deadpan, and a dash of Kelly Link's inexplicable weirdness. I zipped through this collection, and just re-read a chunk of it again when I sat down to scratch out these notes. Really enjoyed, someone find Sara Levine and force her to keep writing. Four stars.
December 30, 2017
A selection of short stories, mostly dark in a humorous vein, often about the different perceptions that men and women have of situations and relationships. The title story “Short Dark Oracles” was probably the best but I enjoyed most of them, finding them both amusing and insightful. But not nearly as good as Sara Levine’s excellent novel Treasure Island!!!.
September 1, 2019
I am a sucker for well written short story collections with sprinkles of unresolved endings and unexpected twists. There was plenty for me to feast upon here. Flavors ranged from broken human tragedy to absurdism. All very smartly told. I look forward to reading more of Sara Levine’s work.
September 23, 2018
Smart and dark and original and so funny and somewhat elliptical at times... my kind of collection. Glad I bought it. Caketrain should just set up a subscription service.
April 3, 2025
some neat parts, but extremely underbaked
February 7, 2019
Ever since I read the obsessive and demented caper that is Levine’s Treasure Island!!! I’ve been hungry for more of her work. When I happened to spot our very own S. Elizabeth reading this, I immediately snatched up a copy for myself. This collection of short fiction is every bit as creative, hilarious, and strange and Levine’s novel. I want more!
September 5, 2014
These are short stories for people who hate short stories--they're quick and they're funny even when taking on complex subjects. Levine writes in an "offbeat" sort of way, approaching her subjects from the side instead of head-on. She has a good way of deploying funny lines that are also very telling and surprising. She does it over and over, ending a paragraph or cutting short a thought or a mood with something unexpectedly vulgar or on-the-nose, and she does it enough that it's almost a stylistic tic, but it doesn't get old because the lines are always, or anyway often, very funny.
Standout stories for me: The Good Woman, about a woman who breaks up with her boyfriend; the Following Fifteen Things, about a woman in an affair with a married womanizer and chooses to remain in the affair knowing how bad it is for her and how she is being used; Baby Love, about how it feels to have a baby; and so on. There are more. Describing the "plots" of the stories doesn't really tell you about them, though, or suggest how entertaining they are. The writing style's the thing.
Standout stories for me: The Good Woman, about a woman who breaks up with her boyfriend; the Following Fifteen Things, about a woman in an affair with a married womanizer and chooses to remain in the affair knowing how bad it is for her and how she is being used; Baby Love, about how it feels to have a baby; and so on. There are more. Describing the "plots" of the stories doesn't really tell you about them, though, or suggest how entertaining they are. The writing style's the thing.
October 6, 2015
"I wasn’t necessarily losing faith in the modern short story before I read Sara Levine’s debut collection Short Dark Oracles, but I was experiencing a dry spell of sorts- a month at most in these saturated times- in finding stories that went beyond simple compound emoting, surrogate characters using bad dialogue, or weird anti-narratives with no foundation. I take only partial blame. This book, excellent as it is on its own in a vacuum outside of my life, became my reminder that people are still out in the world crafting peculiar tales that resonate with the humor and sadness inherent in any truth."
FULL REVIEW AT [PANK]
FULL REVIEW AT [PANK]
January 3, 2013
This collection of short stories is self-aware, well written, and funny. The only issue I had was that structurally it loses steam near the close. A whimper rather than a Zildjian crash ending. Still, a great read. Highly recommended.
September 9, 2011
Crazy good short stories that made me think of a more approachable and funnier Lydia Davis, by my new Facebook friend and fellow NU alum Sara Levine. Can't wait to check out her upcoming novel! :)
Want to read
September 10, 2012from publisher
December 17, 2015
Lovely & strange. I only wish there had been more here stories to enjoy.
October 2, 2015
Kvaliteta priča dosta oscilira, s tim da je pripovijest "A Promise" apsolutno remek-djelo i zaslužuje 10 a ne pet zvjezdica.
November 7, 2011
Awesome.
Awesome awesome.
Awesome awesome.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews