A powerful yet refreshing essay collection centred around themes of confession, illness, violence and sentimentality from an exciting new American talent
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The subjects of this stylish and audacious collection of essays range from an assault in Nicaragua to a Morgellons meeting; from Frida Kahlo's plaster casts to a gangland tour of LA. Jamison is interested in how we tell stories about injury and pain, and the limits that circumstances, bodies and identity put on the act of describing.
Short-listed for William Hazzlit Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize 2013 (UK)
A work of tremendous pleasure and tremendous pain. Leslie Jamison is so intelligent, so compassionate, and so fiercely, prodigiously brave. This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best -- Eleanor Catton, author The Luminaries
Extraordinary, exacting [and] virtuosic... There is a glory to [her] writing that derives as much from its ethical generosity as it does from the lovely vividness of the language itself... It's hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice emerging this year -- Olivia Laing New York Times Book Review
Extraordinary... If this is the new age of the essay, Jamison is one of the form's most compelling voices -- Elizabeth Minkel New Statesman
[A] fine odyssey around pain... [Jamison] fathoms deep pockets of intellectual and emotional curiosity [and] writes with surgical exactness... [A] rich feast of searching and questioning -- Marina Benjamin Independent on Sunday
Exceptional... A fantastically assured and revealing treatment of a contemporary predicament -- Brian Dillon Guardian
Jamison combines the intellectual rigor of a philosopher, the imagination of a novelist and a reporter's keen eye for detail in these essays, which seamlessly blend reportage, cultural criticism, theory and memoir Los Angeles Times
Extraordinary... Her cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say that we feel someone else's pain... I'll read whatever she writes... Her tiny rogue beat box makes an indelible noise... A rare writer New York Times
Brilliant. At times steel-cold or chilli-hot, she picks her way through a society that has lost it way, a voyeur of voyeurism. Here now comes the post-Sontag, post-modern American essay -- Ed Vulliamy, author Amexica: War Along the Borderline
The Empathy Exams is a book of surprises, and those surprises are so smart, so elegantly arranged, and so various that you almost forget that Leslie Jamison's subject is pain, the root human subject that (of course) you almost can never forget. Her mind is so quicksilver alert, her materials so volatile, that you might also miss her poise, stamina, and authority.This is non-fiction of the most stylish and audacious sort -- Robert Polito, Graywolf Non-Fiction Prize 2012
These essays - risky, brilliant, and full of heart - ricochet between what it is to be alive and to be a creature wondering what it is to be alive. Jamison's words, torqued to a perfect balance, shine brightly, allowing both fury and wonder to open inside us -- Nick Flynn, author Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Leslie Jamison has written a profound exploration into how empathy deepens us, yet how we unwittingly sabotage our own capacities for it...This riveting book will make you a better writer, a better human -- Mary Karr, author The Liar's Club
A necessary book, a brilliant antidote to the noise of our time. Intellectually rigorous, it's also plainly personal, honest and intimate, clear-eyed about its confusions...This fierce collection's cri de cour is that we desperately need new words. Leslie Jamison comes to her subject but finds nothing ready made, or, at best, a rickety, suspect vocabulary, and so, starting over, takes her 'pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other' and crushes them together until a vital new language begins to emerge -- Charles D’Ambrosio, author The Dead Fish Museum
Leslie Jamison threads her fine mind through the needle of emotion, sewing our desire for feeling to our fear of feeling. Her essays pierce both pain and sweetness -- Eula Bliss
Leslie Jamison writes with her whole heart and an unconfined intelligence, a combination that gives The Empathy Exams-an inquiry into modern ways and problems of feeling-a persuasive, often thrilling authority. These essays reach out for the world, seeking the extraordinary, the bizarre, the alone, the unfeeling, and finding always what is human. -- Michelle Orange
Jamison's scintillating essays are proof that empathy is the key to the literary imagination. Bold, surprising and insightful about the psychology of emotional life -- Roman Krznaric, author Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution
She writes with passion and panache; her sentences are elegantly formed, her voice on the page intimate and insistent... [She is] always intelligent, self-questioning [and] willing to experiment with form... Exemplary SF Gate
Powerful... Leslie Jamison has announced herself as [a] rising star Boston Globe
Extraordinary Slate
[Jamison] could be a granddaughter of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag... The Empathy Exams is their descendant, yet Jamison's blend of wit and brainy warmth is completely distinctive... Remarkable The Atlantic
[The] essay at its finest - transformative, and here just in time Daily Beast
Pace yourself, let each essay resound before moving on to another... Illuminating -- Max Lui Independent
Jamison is in total command of her material, able to swing from dry precision to poetry. But it is her ability to notice and needle her own artifice that makes her work fly... Very good -- Sophie Elmhirst Financial Times
A page-turner... Jamison is revitalising the post-Susan Sontag essay -- Joanna Biggs Sunday Times
Thought-provoking and vivid... Jamison achieves an engaging style in which anecdote and analysis are finely balanced -- Anita Sethi Observer
Jamison has been hailed as a startling new voice in American letters. [This] demonstrates why she's attracting such attention. She combines fearless questioning with utterly compelling story-telling -- Vanessa Baird New Internationalist
Shockingly fresh and new. Think Sloane Crosley in a deep and contemplative email exchange with Susan Sontag Twin Factory
It's hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice emerging this year... Extraordinary -- Olivia Laing Scotsman
Substantial, well-read, full of research... [Jamison] is lucid and lively with a good eye for interest -- Claire Lowdon TLS
Jamison has made something weird and rare and special and flawed. Something that plainly asks for, and deserves, our attention Totally Dublin
Each essay is illuminating, stylish and a pleasure to read -- Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett 'Books of the Year' Guardian
Brilliant -- Sinead Gleeson ‘Book of the Year’ Irish Times
[Jamison's] charm and honesty converge with empathy for those she encounters, and for ourselves reflected in her thoughts -- Best Books of 2014 Vanity Fair
A confessional essayist, but never a bore, she's attentive to how egotistical empathy can be Herald
Challenging and superb Evening Standard
Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan. She is currently studying for a PhD at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on poverty and degradation in twentieth century American writing. Her first novel, The Gin Closet, was published in 2010.
A powerful yet refreshing essay collection centred around themes of confession, illness, violence and sentimentality from an exciting new American talent. The subjects of this stylish and audacious collection of essays range from an assault in Nicaragua to a Morgellons meeting; from Frida Kahlo's plaster casts to a gangland tour of LA. Jamison is interested in how we tell stories about injury and pain, and the limits that circumstances, bodies and identity put on the act of describing.
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