About the Book On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, shes 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, whats all this computer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of Cs questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it? Book Synopsis On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, shes 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, whats all this computer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of Cs questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it? The Visitors is mordantly funny as it follows a woman dealing with debt, lust and an unwelcome visitor in the last days of a broken status quo. It peers into How We Got Here and asks What We Do Next, whatever our personal hallucinations may be. Review Quotes Elements of the novel (particularly its exploration of cybernetics as a ubiquitous controller of domestic life) recall the work of such 20th-century greats as DeLillo, but Stevens voice--which is meticulous, wide ranging, and moored in a different perspective from the 20th centurys predominantly white male hegemonies--makes her work particularly suited for the current centurys artistic needs. Ambitious and powerful--a remarkable novel. -- Kirkus Review , starred review You might not think Occupy Wall Street and prophetic garden gnomes would fit together within the confines of the same narrative. Now, heres Jessi Jezewska Stevenss new novel The Visitors to make the case that, yes, the two can mesh together seamlessly. Its the kind of ambitious, madcap narrative combination thats all too rare nowadays.--Tobias Carroll, Tor.com Its as if The Big Short were set in the dreamworld of Rachel Ingallss Mrs. Caliban . . . --Audrey Wollen, New York Times The Visitors addresses it subjects through a dance of symbols and signifiers. --Wall Street Journal [A] mordantly funny requiem for the early 21st century . . . The odd touch of magic does nothing to diminish the storys uneasy relevance to the contemporary state of affairs. Fans of such paranoia masters as DeLillo and Pynchon should give this a look. --Publishers Weekly The Visitors is a slim book with a lot going on. . . The book accepts, and even delights in, the strenuous absurdity of its characters efforts to index the relationship between the virtual and the material, or to locate the source of reality in imagination. --Daisy Hildyard, The Guardian The Visitors is conceptually bold. Stevens threads through needles of political theory so deftly you barely feel them piercing the brain. Her work calmly suggests this: the apocalypse is coming for us all, baby--so, what are you doing about it? --Annie Hayter, The Big Issue Its both a bold, imaginative play on very recent history and a trenchant prophecy of the terrifying times were collectively staring down the barrel of. --Anna Cafolla, The Face Summer Reads 2022 [A]s its semi-fictional world frays at every edge, we stay close with C., a deeply written character who could be any of us: beset by the stresses of debt, anxious about decisions made and decisions to come, yet filled with all the rich longing, desire, and tenderness that renews our humanity, even at the worst of times. --Lithub, included in 35 Novels You Need to Read This Summer Here is a refreshing novel by an author willing to take chances...The Visitors stands as a pensive and important work...rare and exciting company. -- Necessary Fiction Is it possible to imagine something so fully that it takes on a life of its own? So many systems run only on belief. Its possible that a novel, like this one, does, too. -- Star Tribune Author Endorsements Jessi Jezewska Stevenss frighteningly brilliant new novel The Visitors is both a bold reimagining of the recent past and an all-too-likely prophecy of whats to come. Caustic, intimate, and consistently surprising, this novel cements Stevenss place as one of the great chroniclers of our cruel and terrifying times. --Andrew Martin In Jessi Jezewska Stevenss timeless novel, The Visitors , nothing is as it seems, everything is in motion, and progress and decay are simultaneous. Amid 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. Stevenss intimacy with history borders on the telepathic. The Visitors is transcendent and astounding in every way. --Michael Zapata Jessi Jezewksa Stevenss 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, Im half-convinced it couldnt 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 Berrymans lines, and a premise as wild and lit as one of Philip K. Dicks 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 ONeill About the Author Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q (2020), The Visitors (2022) and the story collection Ghost Pains (2024). Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Harpers, Foreign Policy, The Paris Review, Tin House, Granta and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Middlebury College and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in New York and Geneva.