LEIGH STEIN

Esther, aspirante a actriz, a sus veinticinco años es escupida por la universidad sin que el mecanismo de la industria cultural la absorba, viéndose obligada a escoger una opción tan temida como inevitable: volver a vivir con sus padres y gastar lo menos posible. Ante la obligación de regresar al nido, lo mejor que puede hacer es poner en marcha un plan de evasión. Esther no sabe qué hacer con sus estudios y mucho menos con su vida, pero no tendrá más remedio que aceptar el trabajo que su madre ha encontrado para ella: hacer de canguro para la hija de sus vecinos, los Brown. Sin embargo, no será un trabajo fácil. Esther se convertirá en la confidente de la pequeña May, a la que debe cuidar, y de su madre Amy, que está en pleno proceso de recuperación tras la pérdida de su segundo bebé. Amy, aún traumatizada, acaba construyendo, como nueva «loca del desván», una inquietante «habitación del duelo» en la buhardilla de su casa, mientras su marido, Nate, no puede dejar de echarle el ojo a la jovencísima niñera. Esther, atrapada entre modelos de supuesta madurez completamente conflictivos y condenados a chocar entre sí, se verá forzada a dar un giro a su plan, replantearse, como una nueva Jane Eyre, su papel de nanny, y a hacerse una idea más clara sobre aquello que desea y aquello que no puede evitar ser.

A satirical novel about female cofounders of a wellness start-up who struggle to find balance between being good people and doing good business.

"[A] thoughtful and compelling elegy to a troubled man, a broken love, and a broken dream of the west."Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy ExamsAn MSN Best Book of 2016Set against the stark and surreal landscape of New Mexico, Land of Enchantment is a coming-of-age memoir about young love, obsession, and loss, and how a person can imprint a place in your mind forever. When Leigh Stein received a call from an unknown number in July 2011, she let it go to voice mail, assuming it would be her ex-boyfriend Jason. Instead, the call was from his brother: Jason had been killed in a motorcycle accident. He was twenty-three years old. She had seen him alive just a few weeks earlier.Leigh first met Jason at an audition for a tragic play. He was nineteen and troubled and intensely magnetic, a dead ringer for James Dean. Leigh was twenty-two and living at home with her parents, trying to figure out what to do with her young adult life. Within months, they had fallen in love and moved to New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment, a place neither of them had ever been. But what was supposed to be a romantic adventure quickly turned sinister, as Jasons behavior went from playful and spontaneous to controlling and erratic, eventually escalating to violence. Now New Mexico was marked by isolation and the anxiety of how to leave a man she both loved and feared. Even once Leigh moved on to New York, throwing herself into her work, Jason and their time together haunted her.Land of Enchantment lyrically explores the heartbreaking complexity of why the person hurting you the most can be impossible to leave. With searing honesty and cutting humor, Leigh wrestles with what made her fall in love with someone so destructive and how to grieve a man who wasnt always good to her.

Poems about pop culture, mortality, and the internet, written during the Coronavirus pandemicfor readers who are more likely to double-tap Instapoems than put their phone down long enough to read The Decameron.Catalyzed by sheltering in place and by a personal challenge to give up alcohol for thirty days, Leigh Stein, the poet laureate of The Bachelor, has written a twenty-first-century Decameron to frame modern fables. What to Miss When makes mischief of reality TV and wellness influencers, juicy thoughtcrimes and love languages, and the mixed messages of contemporary feminism. Think Starlight, the first poem in this collection, written before any self-quarantine orders, imagined the likelihood that the United States would follow in Italys footsteps in terms of caseload and hospital overwhelm. By March 17, 2020, the imagined was the real: New York City had closed schools, bars, and restaurantswith the rest of the country close behind. With nihilist humor and controlled despair, What to Miss When explores fears of death and grocery shopping, stress cleaning and drinking, celebrities behaving badly, everything we took for granted, and life mediated by screenswith dissociation-via-internet, and looking for mirrors in a fourteenth-century pandemic text, a kind of survival response to living casually through catastrophe.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER For anyone who has felt fate intervening on their TikTok feed (USA Today) comes a gothic horror story wrapped up in a mystery [with] much to say about Hollywood, social media, and the creator economy (Los Angeles Times)Here youll find that gothic horror, so often lurking in the dingy dark, can manifest also in the fluorescent world of the terminally online.NPRThe internet: You may think youre inhabiting it, but is it really inhabiting you?After her boyfriend dumps her in a Reddit post, unemployed thirty-nine-year-old Dayna accepts an unusual opportunity from a man she stopped speaking to twenty years ago: If Dayna can help Craig transform his crumbling mansion into a successful hype house of influencers, he can restore his birthright to its former glory, and she can bring her career back from the dead.But missing from the mansion is Becca, an enigmatic tarot card reader who built a rabid fandom with her cryptic, soul-touching videos . . . and then vanished. With nineteen-year-old Olivia, the newest member of the hype house (and one of Beccas biggest fans), Dayna begins to build a social media campaign around Beccas disappearance that will catapult the creators to new heights of success. Too bad Craig forbids Dayna from pursuing the mystery at its heart.As Olivia searches for traces of Becca in a labyrinthine house that seems intent on hiding its secrets, and Dayna becomes entangled with both Craig and Jake, the resident heartthrob and the last person to see Becca, the two women make a shocking discovery that will upend everything.

"Highbrow, brilliant." --The Approval Matrix, New York magazineOne of Cosmopolitans 12 Books Youll Be Dying to Read This SummerA Publishers Weekly Best Book of Summer 2020A Vulture Best Book of Summer 2020One of Refinery29s 25 Books Youll Want to Read This SummerAn Esquire Must-Read Book of Summer 2020A Book Riot Best Book of 2020 *so farThe female cofounders of a wellness start-up struggle to find balance between being good people and doing good business, while trying to stay BFFs.Maren Gelb is on a company-imposed digital detox. She tweeted something terrible about the Presidents daughter, and as the COO of Richual, the most inclusive online community platform for women to cultivate the practice of self-care and change the world by changing ourselves, its a PR nightmare. Not only is CEO Devin Avery counting on Maren to be fully present for their next round of funding, but indispensable employee Khadijah Walker has been keeping a secret that will reveal just how feminist Richuals values actually are, and former Bachelorette contestant and Richual board member Evan Wiley is about to be embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal that could destroy the company forever. Have you ever scrolled through Instagram and seen countless influencers who seem like experts at caring for themselvesfrom their yoga crop tops to their well-lit clean meals to their serumed skin and erudite-but-color-coded reading stack? Self Care delves into the lives and psyches of people working in the wellness industry and exposes the world behind the filter.