Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s fiction wryly examines the vagaries of living in an age of downward mobility and phone-based anomie—with its indignities, its mystifications, its curious bursts of levity. Her 2020 novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q, is a sort of post-9/11 ghost story, while The Visitors (2022) invites an actual gnome to Manhattan in the aftermath of the global economic crisis. Her first short-story collection, Ghost Pains, was published in March by And Other Stories. The characters in these stories miss cues and suffer their own maladroitness: In “The Party,” an American expat in Berlin is stuck hosting an agonizing party after confusing “reply” and “reply all.” Throughout the collection, there’s dread and there’s malaise, but I’d argue there really isn’t any cynicism—which is a feat for any observer of our era of speculation and paranoia. In place of cynicism is unexpected grace, like the ruminating newlywed protagonist of “Honeymoon” finds despite herself.
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