Walter B. Levis

WRITER 

Walter B. Levis, a former crime reporter, now teaches and writes freelance. His nonfiction has appeared in newspapers and magazines including The New York Daily News, The National Law Journal, The Chicago Reporter, The Chicago Lawyer, The New Republic, Show Business Magazine, and The New Yorker. He is author of the novel MOMENTS OF DOUBT (2003). His short fiction, which includes a 1991 Henfield Prize and a 2006 Pushcart nomination, has appeared in a variety of publications, including North Dakota Quarterly, The Amherst Review, The Cimarron Review, and The Connecticut Review, among many others. Mr. Levis earned a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA from Columbia University. Please click here for information about music.

Moments of Doubt

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About the novel: Eli Shaffner had it all—an attractive, intelligent girlfriend, a wealthy family, the perks of privilege. It was the opportunity to build the kind of life most people can only dream about. But a few obstacles got in his way—lust, pride, and a high-minded sense of professional purpose. In the darkly comic tradition of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Moments of Doubt is the emotionally charged account of how a man makes his way through passion, pain, and paradox toward the cathartic realization that sometimes, in the end, the very things you thought were destroying your life prove to be the only things that can make you happy.

What readers have said about
MOMENTS OF DOUBT

“It’s about relationships, about the way we figure out who we are by who we love. . . I highly recommend this book.”

 —Diana Ricky host “Say What”, WHNP, Springfield, MA

“This book is hilarious. Would make a great Woody Allen movie.”

 —Joe Poire, host “Cape Cod Calling”, WOMR, Cape Cod, RI

“Levis’s characterizations recall those of Dickens. . . but his ability to write is purely American: concise as Hemingway, but intellectual, with a sense of humor, and Jewish.”

 —Jane Summer, author of The Silk Road

“Credible, engaging, maddening. A fine blend of narrative spoof and self-searching. The Jew replacing the Lotus agrees with my own spiritual path.”

 —Peter Pitzele, author of Our Father’s Wells

“. . . from the East Bank Club to the beaches of Evanston and up the North Shore, Levis’s comic tale spans the emotional crises of a self-absorbed tennis instructor.”

 —Chicago Magazine

“. . . funny and provocative. A Jewish Holden Caulfield. Levis has given us a gripping account of a young intellectual in today’s America.”

 —Patti Wolman, author of Behind the Playdough Curtain

“The reader is caught up in the story without ever feeling—oh, this is a novel. . . It’s a very sweet book.”

—James Atlas, author of Bellow: A Biography

© Walter B. Levis