Ghost Pains, a short story collection by Writing alumna and Adjunct Assistant Professor Jessi Jezewska Stevens ’18, will be published on March 5, 2024 by And Other Stories Publishing.
Containing works previously released in The Paris Review and Harper’s, Ghost Pains is Stevens’ first short story collection. The eleven stories of the collection feature women who explore ethics, love, and history in a divided, present-day America. These women throw tumultuous parties in “the post-party era” and wake up with old flames in new cities, all while probing how history influences care and neglect.
“Jessi Jezewska Stevens is a deft, wry stylist attuned to ‘the metaphysics of the moment’ and the machinations of late capital,” says writer Justin Taylor. “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.”
Writer Amina Cain writes, “I remember the first time I read Jessi Jezewska Stevens: ‘The Party’ in The Paris Review. Immediately drawn to its strangely rhythmic sentences, its playful sense of humor, I've stayed interested in her writing ever since. 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, not only because she takes up matters like alienation, interrelationality, and change, but for the exact way in which she writes them.”
Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ novels include The Exhibition of Persephone Q, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the The Visitors. Her reporting, criticism, and fiction can be read in The Dial, Foreign Policy, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New Yorker online, The Nation, New York Magazine, Bookforum, 4Columns, and elsewhere. She is a 2021-2022 Fulbright scholar in Berlin, holds a BA in mathematics from Middlebury College, and an MFA from Columbia University in Fiction. She is based in Geneva.
