The Visitors

On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she's now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, an empty apartment, 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 take stock, 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 as to the vulnerability of the national grid? More, what's all this computer code doing in the novel of her life? And could the answers to all of C's questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it? Replaying recent history through a distorting glass - as though William Gibson had penned The Big Short - The Visitors is a mordantly funny tour through a world where not only civic infrastructure but human minds can be hacked; where mythical creatures talk like Don DeLillo; where sex is little more than a blip in our metadata. It peers into How We Got Here and asks What We Do Next, exploring the limits of art and love in a culture of increasing economic and technological impotence.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of The Visitors and The Exhibition of Persephone Q. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Middlebury College and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in New York and Geneva.