Ghost Pains
Jessi Jezewska Stevens
(Author)
Description
One of LitHub, Bookshop.org and i-D's most anticipated books of 2024
With her novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors, Jessi Jezewska Stevens has proven herself as our preeminent purveyor of comical, techno-millenarian unease. Now, with this first collection of her acclaimed short fiction--originally appearing in such venues as The Paris Review, Harper's and Tin House--some of her very best work is at last readily available to readers.
Stevens's women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognizable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigate the labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for--or neglect--one another. With each story exemplifying Stevens's ability to examine the big questions through the microscope of a shambolic human perspective, Ghost Pains is a triumphant statement of purpose from one of our greatest young writer-thinkers.
Product Details
Price
$19.95
$18.55
Publisher
And Other Stories
Publish Date
March 05, 2024
Pages
304
Dimensions
4.9 X 7.7 X 0.7 inches | 0.4 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781913505844
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About the Author
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q (2020), The Visitors (2022) and the story collection Ghost Pains (2024). Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Harper's, Foreign Policy, The Paris Review, Tin House, Granta and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Middlebury College and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in New York and Geneva.
Reviews
"Stevens' impeccable artistry manages to overlay the gauzy romance of the stranger in a strange land atop the grim economic and interpersonal realities that so often accompany relative youth, relative freedom, and relative love. Erudite, eloquent, and bittersweet--these stories are like chewing on the orange rind for a last bitter taste of the drink." --Kirkus Reviews
"I remember the first time I read a short story by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. I was immediately drawn to its strangely rhythmic sentences, its playful sense of humor. There is a brilliant feeling of both absurdity and sincerity in these stories, of the time we are living through. I know I will want to read her always." --Amina Cain
"Jessi Jezewska Stevens is a deft, wry stylist attuned to 'the metaphysics of the moment' and the machinations of late capital. These eleven rich, mysterious stories take us from Gettysburg to Berlin, from Siberia to the virtual, and always through the labyrinth of the heart. This is a happy haunting: the sharp, brainy, beautiful ache of Ghost Pains will linger long after its last page is turned." --Justin Taylor
"Gardens of forking paths, two-faced beauties, secret hundred-millionaires beset by digitally born imps, loads of snacks, and the city of Berlin all feature in these beguiling tales. Jessi Jezewska Stevens provides the best sort of brain massage: bittersweet, with flashes of philosophy." --Lucy Ives
Praise for The Visitors "It's as if The Big Short were set in the dreamworld of Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban . . ." --Audrey Wollen, New York Times "The Visitors addresses it subjects through a dance of symbols and signifiers." --Wall Street Journal "[A] mordantly funny requiem for the early 21st century . . . The odd touch of magic does nothing to diminish the story's uneasy relevance to the contemporary state of affairs. Fans of such paranoia masters as DeLillo and Pynchon should give this a look." --Publisher's Weekly "The Visitors is a slim book with a lot going on. . . The book accepts, and even delights in, the strenuous absurdity of its characters' efforts to index the relationship between the virtual and the material, or to locate the source of reality in imagination." --Daisy Hildyard, The Guardian "The Visitors is conceptually bold. Stevens threads through needles of political theory so deftly you barely feel them piercing the brain. Her work calmly suggests this: the apocalypse is coming for us all, baby--so, what are you doing about it?" --Annie Hayter, The Big Issue "It's both a bold, imaginative play on very recent history and a trenchant prophecy of the terrifying times we're collectively staring down the barrel of." --Anna Cafolla, The Face Summer Reads 2022
"Jessi Jezewska Stevens's frighteningly brilliant new novel The Visitors is both a bold reimagining of the recent past and an all-too-likely prophecy of what's to come. Caustic, intimate, and consistently surprising, this novel cements Stevens's place as one of the great chroniclers of our cruel and terrifying times." --Andrew Martin "In Jessi Jezewska Stevens's timeless novel, The Visitors, nothing is as it seems, everything is in motion, and progress and decay are simultaneous. Amid credit scores and talking spectres, revolutionary impulses and the indissoluble truths found in a lifelong friendship, Stevens paints a brilliant and richly captivating portrait of an artist teetering between her own past and an American collapse happening in real time. Stevens's intimacy with history borders on the telepathic. The Visitors is transcendent and astounding in every way." --Michael Zapata "Jessi Jezewksa Stevens's scalpel-fine prose--slicing with wit and pathos--belies the bewildering scope of The Visitors, which lays bare everything from the audacity of modern finance to the visceral costs of debt, love, and success. Yet while collapse looms nigh, every page beams with defiant jubilance and gut-punch insights. Equal parts revelatory and moving, The Visitors cuts to the core of the delusion and disillusionment of our era." --Jakob Guanzon "The Visitors is such a unique gem of a novel--an intimate and affecting character study that is somehow also a DeLillo-esque container for diamond-sharp insights into big data, eco-terrorism, and the subprime mortgage crisis--that, like the garden gnome who haunts its protagonist, I'm half-convinced it couldn't possibly exist. But it does, and it is dazzling, and Stevens' readers are incredibly lucky to have it." --Adam Wilson
"This book is a speedball, with lines as beautifully sad and weary as John Berryman's lines, and a premise as wild and lit as one of Philip K. Dick's premises. Stevens is a writer who makes you want to slow down and read each sentence carefully, even as you want to race forward and see what happens." --Benjamin Nugent "One of my favorite writers has written another imaginative and attentive marvel. The Visitors is about business: the business of staying alive, the business of being with others, the business of staying sane, and the business of business." --Rivka Galchen
"An orgy of synaptic firing and flourish, The Visitors is a novel of longing, lostness, and late capitalism told with roving imagination and warmth." --Tracy O'Neill
Bookseller Praise for The Visitors "Jessi Jezewska Stevens has created a parallel timeline as tumultuous and dread-inducing as our own, yet somehow this distorted reality reveals more about the preoccupations of existing than it's lived counterpart ever could. Part time capsule, part user manual, and part hallucinatory malware, The Visitors will still be with you long after the lights have gone out." --Josie Smith, Greenlight Bookstore "What would you do if an interrogating gnome appeared in your apartment one morning and never left? If you are C, the artist-protagonist of Jessi Jezewska Stevens' enthralling novel, The Visitors, you constantly question whether your gnome is real or imagined, all while operating a NYC art supply store, mourning the end of your marriage and your fertility, hiding from personal bankruptcy, and longing for a romantic relationship with your oldest friend, Zo. Apart from C's personal troubles, a terrorist group called GoodNite is destroying city power grids and staging protests around the world. Stevens fully immerses readers into C's world, exploring the artist's relationship to her craft, how loneliness exploits our deepest fears and vulnerabilities, the affection and jealousy between childhood girlfriends, and the permanent scar of immigrant trauma. A clever, thought-provoking novel that is as surprising as it is satisfying." --Lori Feathers, Interabang Books "Stevens' writing is vicious and cerebral, an enthralling combination. she has a lovely knack of hinting and alluding to goings-on elsewhere (the best kind of narration, imho). a cynical sophomore novel that deserves all the praise it will no doubt receive." --Doug Riggs, Bank Square Books
"Stevens returns with a skillful and expansive collection ranging from Nabokovian confessions to fabulist sketches. Stevens remains a distinctive prose stylist with a wry sense of humor and an inventive approach to plot. Readers will enjoy visiting Stevens's delightfully weird world."--Publishers Weekly
"Ghost Pains is a brilliant, sophisticated collection. Jessi Jezewska Stevens is one of the rare writers capable of taking both life and literature seriously while giving you reasons to laugh." --Nell Zink
"Jessi Jezewska Stevens's stories gleam with their wonderfully bleak comic swerves, keen observation and fresh syntax. The world may be a goner, but short fiction is in good hands here. Ghost Pains is alive, an invigorating pleasure." --Sam Lipsyte"I remember the first time I read a short story by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. I was immediately drawn to its strangely rhythmic sentences, its playful sense of humor. There is a brilliant feeling of both absurdity and sincerity in these stories, of the time we are living through. I know I will want to read her always." --Amina Cain
"Jessi Jezewska Stevens is a deft, wry stylist attuned to 'the metaphysics of the moment' and the machinations of late capital. These eleven rich, mysterious stories take us from Gettysburg to Berlin, from Siberia to the virtual, and always through the labyrinth of the heart. This is a happy haunting: the sharp, brainy, beautiful ache of Ghost Pains will linger long after its last page is turned." --Justin Taylor
"Gardens of forking paths, two-faced beauties, secret hundred-millionaires beset by digitally born imps, loads of snacks, and the city of Berlin all feature in these beguiling tales. Jessi Jezewska Stevens provides the best sort of brain massage: bittersweet, with flashes of philosophy." --Lucy Ives
Praise for The Visitors "It's as if The Big Short were set in the dreamworld of Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban . . ." --Audrey Wollen, New York Times "The Visitors addresses it subjects through a dance of symbols and signifiers." --Wall Street Journal "[A] mordantly funny requiem for the early 21st century . . . The odd touch of magic does nothing to diminish the story's uneasy relevance to the contemporary state of affairs. Fans of such paranoia masters as DeLillo and Pynchon should give this a look." --Publisher's Weekly "The Visitors is a slim book with a lot going on. . . The book accepts, and even delights in, the strenuous absurdity of its characters' efforts to index the relationship between the virtual and the material, or to locate the source of reality in imagination." --Daisy Hildyard, The Guardian "The Visitors is conceptually bold. Stevens threads through needles of political theory so deftly you barely feel them piercing the brain. Her work calmly suggests this: the apocalypse is coming for us all, baby--so, what are you doing about it?" --Annie Hayter, The Big Issue "It's both a bold, imaginative play on very recent history and a trenchant prophecy of the terrifying times we're collectively staring down the barrel of." --Anna Cafolla, The Face Summer Reads 2022
"Jessi Jezewska Stevens's frighteningly brilliant new novel The Visitors is both a bold reimagining of the recent past and an all-too-likely prophecy of what's to come. Caustic, intimate, and consistently surprising, this novel cements Stevens's place as one of the great chroniclers of our cruel and terrifying times." --Andrew Martin "In Jessi Jezewska Stevens's timeless novel, The Visitors, nothing is as it seems, everything is in motion, and progress and decay are simultaneous. Amid credit scores and talking spectres, revolutionary impulses and the indissoluble truths found in a lifelong friendship, Stevens paints a brilliant and richly captivating portrait of an artist teetering between her own past and an American collapse happening in real time. Stevens's intimacy with history borders on the telepathic. The Visitors is transcendent and astounding in every way." --Michael Zapata "Jessi Jezewksa Stevens's scalpel-fine prose--slicing with wit and pathos--belies the bewildering scope of The Visitors, which lays bare everything from the audacity of modern finance to the visceral costs of debt, love, and success. Yet while collapse looms nigh, every page beams with defiant jubilance and gut-punch insights. Equal parts revelatory and moving, The Visitors cuts to the core of the delusion and disillusionment of our era." --Jakob Guanzon "The Visitors is such a unique gem of a novel--an intimate and affecting character study that is somehow also a DeLillo-esque container for diamond-sharp insights into big data, eco-terrorism, and the subprime mortgage crisis--that, like the garden gnome who haunts its protagonist, I'm half-convinced it couldn't possibly exist. But it does, and it is dazzling, and Stevens' readers are incredibly lucky to have it." --Adam Wilson
"This book is a speedball, with lines as beautifully sad and weary as John Berryman's lines, and a premise as wild and lit as one of Philip K. Dick's premises. Stevens is a writer who makes you want to slow down and read each sentence carefully, even as you want to race forward and see what happens." --Benjamin Nugent "One of my favorite writers has written another imaginative and attentive marvel. The Visitors is about business: the business of staying alive, the business of being with others, the business of staying sane, and the business of business." --Rivka Galchen
"An orgy of synaptic firing and flourish, The Visitors is a novel of longing, lostness, and late capitalism told with roving imagination and warmth." --Tracy O'Neill
Bookseller Praise for The Visitors "Jessi Jezewska Stevens has created a parallel timeline as tumultuous and dread-inducing as our own, yet somehow this distorted reality reveals more about the preoccupations of existing than it's lived counterpart ever could. Part time capsule, part user manual, and part hallucinatory malware, The Visitors will still be with you long after the lights have gone out." --Josie Smith, Greenlight Bookstore "What would you do if an interrogating gnome appeared in your apartment one morning and never left? If you are C, the artist-protagonist of Jessi Jezewska Stevens' enthralling novel, The Visitors, you constantly question whether your gnome is real or imagined, all while operating a NYC art supply store, mourning the end of your marriage and your fertility, hiding from personal bankruptcy, and longing for a romantic relationship with your oldest friend, Zo. Apart from C's personal troubles, a terrorist group called GoodNite is destroying city power grids and staging protests around the world. Stevens fully immerses readers into C's world, exploring the artist's relationship to her craft, how loneliness exploits our deepest fears and vulnerabilities, the affection and jealousy between childhood girlfriends, and the permanent scar of immigrant trauma. A clever, thought-provoking novel that is as surprising as it is satisfying." --Lori Feathers, Interabang Books "Stevens' writing is vicious and cerebral, an enthralling combination. she has a lovely knack of hinting and alluding to goings-on elsewhere (the best kind of narration, imho). a cynical sophomore novel that deserves all the praise it will no doubt receive." --Doug Riggs, Bank Square Books
