Critics' Opinion:
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Published Mar 2020
224 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Percy is pregnant. She hasn't told a soul. Probably she should tell her husband - certainly she means to - but one night she wakes up to find she no longer recognizes him.
Now, instead of sleeping, Percy is spending her nights taking walks through her neighborhood, all the while fretting over her marriage, her impending motherhood, and the sinister ways the city is changing.
Amid this alienation―from her husband, home, and rapidly changing body―a package arrives. In it: an exhibition catalog for a photography show. The photographs consist of a series of digitally manipulated images of a woman lying on a bed in a red room. It takes a moment for even Percy to notice that the woman is herself...but no one else sees the resemblance.
Percy must now come to grips with the fundamental question of identity in the digital age: To what extent do we own our own image, and to what extent is that image shaped by the eyes of others?
Capturing perfectly the haunted atmosphere of Manhattan immediately after 9/11―and the simmering insanity of America ever since―Jessi Jezewska Stevens's The Exhibition of Persephone Q is a darkly witty satire about how easy it is to lose ownership of our own selves.
"As Percy wanders, New York itself is reflected through the prism of her many identities...in luminous prose that captures the essence of a place in the middle of its most defining transformation. A stellar debut." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The 9/11 aspect is unnecessary, but the plot is often fascinating and the reader will race to the end to figure out what, exactly, will happen to Percy. Stevens is a talented writer, and her debut is a propulsive experience." - Publishers Weekly
"Stevens' debut is a compelling and visually rich novel that explores alienation in all its forms. The book's poetic language and realistically absurd characters will keep readers intrigued until the final page." - Booklist
"Percy's perspective is so limited and her world so small that readers who don't identify with her may lose patience. This book's primary audience will be those interested in the ruminations of an insecure young woman trying to find her way in the world." - Library Journal
"Jessi Jezewska Stevens's The Exhibition of Persephone Q is a captivating portrait of urban solitude, by turns strange, poignant, and poetic." - Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters
"The Exhibition of Perserphone Q has the heart of a Hitchcock film. With a voice both riveting and wisely bizarre, Jessi Jezewska Stevens tells a timeless story of the battle to stop the present from turning into the past." - Catherine Lacey, author of Certain American States
"The Exhibition of Persephone Q is a great millennial ghost story, in which a wry, wise, yet guileless heroine is haunted by all the other stories she could be living. Jessi Stevens is the Muriel Spark of 21st century New York." - Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers
"With a voice both lucid and searching, Jessi Stevens depicts the great illogic of love, as well as all the small, strange quiddities of being a body in a material and virtual world. Lit up with melancholy, humor, and perfect oddness, this remarkable debut casts an afterglow long after its final pages." - Hermione Hoby, author of Neon in Daylight
This information about The Exhibition of Persephone Q was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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. She lives in New York, where she teaches fiction.
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