Jessi Jezewska Stevens presents "The Visitors" with Joshua Cohen

Jessi Jezewska Stevens joins us to present her new novel "The Visitors," in conversation with Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen. This virtual event - brought to you in partnership with our friends at Third Place Books (Seattle) and Exile in Bookville (Chicago) - took place on Zoom.
About the book:
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?
Replaying recent history through a distorting glass, "The Visitors" is a mordantly funny tour through a world where not only civic infrastructure but our darkest desires (not to mention our novels) are vulnerable to malware; where mythical creatures talk like Don DeLillo; where love is little more than a blip in our metadata. It peers into How We Got Here and asks What We Do Next, charting the last days of a broken status quo as the path is cleared for something new.
About our guests:
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of "The Visitors" and "The Exhibition of Persephone Q." Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Middlebury College and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in New York and Geneva.
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels "The Netanyahus," "Moving Kings," "Book of Numbers," "Witz," "A Heaven of Others," and "Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto;" the short fiction collection "Four New Messages," and the non-fiction collection "Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction." Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2022, he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction for "The Netanyahus."