Ghost Pains
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.
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.
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