Hell, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people. Jessi Jezewska Stevens would nominate parties. Social catastrophe can stem from the invitation: ‘Email!’ she laments. ‘The way all modern tragedies begin.’ She homes in on the space between what a woman thinks and says and does. Her anti-heroines can be relied on to make wrong decisions – men, marriage, nipple-piercing and, of course, parties. The choice invariably ends in failure.
Ghost Pains is a collection of 11 stories, sardonic and elegant, imbued with a sense of isolation and self-awareness. Stevens’s women throw spectacularly disastrous parties. And attend them. The result can be amusing for the reader while being grievous for the protagonists
The stories are world-hoppers, set in Italy, America, Siberia, Krakow and Berlin. Events are seen askance, from an outsider’s point of view. In ‘Honeymoon’, a newly-wed overdoses on culture in Tuscany: ‘I got distracted by our collective struggle to Renaissance ourselves.
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