Jessi Jezewska Stevens holds a BA in mathematics from Middlebury College and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Tin House, Guernica, BOMB and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US in 2020. She lives in New York, where she teaches fiction.
'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' timeless novel, The Visitors, nothing is as it seems, everything is in motion, and progress and decay are simultaneous. Amidst 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' intimacy with history borders on the telepathic. The Visitors is transcendent and astounding in every way.' Michael Zapata ---- 'Jessi Jezewksa Stevens' 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