Sara Levine’s debut, the 2011 cult classic Treasure Island!!!, inspired an animal-loving Chicago bookseller to boycott one of her author events. They were, Levine explains via Zoom from her home office in Evanston, Ill., protesting because the protagonist kills a parrot.

Levine, 54, is dressed in a crisp white button-up, her wavy gray hair framing her bespectacled face. She leans into the camera as she recollects the unexpected response to her first novel. “I’m so lucky,” she says. “I still get fan mail from readers who loved Treasure Island!!!, and that’s astonishing to me. But there were some people who would write on Goodreads, ‘Don’t read this book if you care about animals.’ So, I think there was a childish part of me that was like, You don’t like what I did to that parrot? Wait till you see what I do to the dog in the next one.” She laughs. “Maybe I shouldn’t say that.”

The next one is Levine’s tragicomic sophomore novel, The Hitch, forthcoming from Roxane Gay’s eponymous imprint at Grove Atlantic in January 2026. Its myopically self-righteous narrator, Rose, is thrilled to spend a week taking care of her beloved six-year-old nephew, Nathan. But their time together is derailed when Rose’s menace of a Newfoundland kills a corgi at the dog park and Nathan subsequently claims that the corgi’s spirit has “jumped into” his body. As Rose becomes increasingly convinced of this possession—even going so far as to consult an exorcist—she alienates her friends and family.

In conversation, as in her work, Levine comes across as equally cerebral and playful, combining an academic’s rigor about writing
on a craft level with an impish rebellious streak. She’s quick with both quips and cultural references—from experimental Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard to Jerry Seinfeld—and the corkboard wall behind her is a chaotic sprawl of note cards, scribblings, and hand-drawn illustrations pertaining to her next project. “I cannot keep it all in here,” she says, tapping the side of her head.

Levine’s detractors may be surprised to learn that she’s also a vegan and a self-identified dog person. She shows the camera a framed photo of her family dog, Digby, and shares bittersweet memories of her first dog, Max, whom her parents took in when she was growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, the youngest of two siblings.

As a child, Levine dreamed of a life in the theater, an ambition she followed to Northwestern University—only, she says, to “discover fiction” halfway through college. What made her pivot? “I think it was the sense of control,” she says. “Theater is wonderful, but it’s collaborative. You need so many other people to make a show. With fiction, there’s a sense of agency. It’s like being able to direct and cast and pick your settings—without having to worry that the theater is going to go up in flames.”

Levine went on to earn a PhD in literature at Brown University, where she discovered that, though she enjoyed reading scholarship, she did not actually want to write it. After completing the degree in 1998, she landed a teaching gig at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and started work on Treasure Island!!!, about a woman who attempts to live her life based on values she’s gleaned from the Stevenson classic. Then, in 2000, she jumped ship for the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches to this day.

She attributes Treasure Island!!!’s long road from ideation to publication partly to the time it took to learn to be “a maker” instead of an academic: “I basically had to unlearn the PhD education that I had been so keen to get,” she says. She was simultaneously working on other projects, too, including her story collection Short Dark Oracles, which also published in 2011.

Only after Treasure Island!!! came out did Levine learn how divisive readers could find so-called unlikable female characters, a category into which that book’s narrator neatly slots. The discourse surprised her: “There’s this long literary tradition of really unpleasant men,” she says, “and we don’t have any problem with that.”

Roxane Gay felt similarly, praising Treasure Island!!! in her essay “Not Here to Make Friends: On the Importance of Unlikable Female Protagonists,” which appears in Bad Feminist and which, Levine says, “did me a tremendous service.”

A longtime fan of Levine’s work, Gay, in her second year at the helm of her imprint, reached out to see what the author was working on. The answer was The Hitch, which Levine had been plugging away at for some time, though early drafts bore only glancing
resemblance to the finished version. “I was initially trying to structure the narrative in a way that reflected the interdependence of microbial organisms,” Levine says. “And I feel like I was in that place for years before I realized that this technical dream I had was interfering with the emotional power of the story.”

Also slowing her process was the fact that Levine only writes in brief intervals; when she started The Hitch, she aimed for just 90 minutes a day. “I put a timer on it,” she says. “You need to know if you’re gonna do something hard, that it’s gonna end. Even if I’m doing well, I stop at 90 minutes, because I’ve found it’s like diminishing returns: I can write myself into a place of dissatisfaction or lostness. I also never ask myself, Was it a good day? Instead I think, Did I show up?”

She had plenty keeping her busy in the meantime, with teaching and raising her now-teenage daughter. “Good books take a long time for me anyway,” she says. “But then on top of that there’s trying to balance being a parent, a partner, a teacher, and a citizen of the world.”

For The Hitch, once the idea for the demon corgi arose, Levine pivoted to researching the conventions of classic possession horror, a rabbit hole that led her from William Peter Blatty’s 1971 The Exorcist to Paul G. Tremblay’s 2015 Head Full of Ghosts. “It was just like with Treasure Island!!!, where I had to really know adventure fiction in order to understand how to work against it, and how to do a feminist reading,” she says. “I found that a lot of possession stories are about good vs. evil, and I wanted to push against that easy binarism.”

Instead, Levine uses the corgi possession both as a fount of humor—“Rose thinks she’s in The Exorcist,” she says, “and Nathan thinks he’s in a Pixar movie”—and as the vessel for an elegant exploration of human connection and interdependence. “I want my work to be funny,” she explains. “It wouldn’t be successful to me if people weren’t laughing. But also, because I write over such a long period of time, there’s got to be something else I’m chasing through the forest of jokes. There has to be something deep and sincere that I take really seriously if I’m going to spend that much time and care getting all the little strands to come together.”

There’s also an intentional degree of ambiguity to the supernatural elements at play, due largely to the fact that Rose—sanctimonious, boundaryless, and harshly judgmental of everyone around her—is an unreliable narrator of her own life. “There are details I included that are almost like a Rorschach test for the reader,” Levine says. “I was trying to create a multiplicity of readings without abdicating the writer’s job, which is to control the material.”

With a twinkle in her eye, Levine confesses that she does have her own opinion about whether or not the possession is actually
happening—but she’s not telling.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Levine grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati, the oldest of two siblings. She grew up in Cleveland, the youngest of two siblings. It also stated she graduated from Brown in 1995; she graduated 1998. Additionally, it said that the character Nathan in The Hitch is 10 years old; he is six years old.