The Visitors (Paperback Edition) - Paperback

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens (Author)

On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she's now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse . . . C needs to put her medical debt and her sex life in order, but how to make concrete plans with this little visitor haunting her apartment, sporting a three-piece suit and delivering impromptu lectures on the vulnerability of the national grid? Moreover, what's all this computer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of C's questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it?
The Visitors is mordantly funny as it follows a woman dealing with debt, lust and an unwelcome visitor in the last days of a broken status quo. It peers into How We Got Here and asks What We Do Next, whatever our personal hallucinations may be.

Author Biography

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.