Leigh Stein

Maren is on a digital detox. She tweeted something terrible about the President's daughter, and as the COO of a wellness brand, it's a PR nightmare. Meanwhile, employee Khadijah Walker has been keeping a secret that will reveal just how feminist the brand's values actually are, and a former Bachelorette contestant and board member is about to be embroiled in a sex scandal. Wellness is all well and good, but Self Care dives into the lives and psyches of these Instagram-famous influencers to expose the world behind the filter.

A Novel

Self Care

Poems

What to Miss When

Just graduated from university, Esther's post-graduate plans include: returning to her parents' house, hanging out with Jack (her unrequited school crush) and re-reading her favourite children's books. Her parents have other ideas and volunteer her to be a nanny for their neighbours, the Browns. It's a tricky assignment: six months earlier, their youngest child had died. But Esther finds herself falling in love with the surviving daughter May and soon becomes entangled in family politics, forcing her to finally address who she really is...

The Fallback Plan

If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You

A funny, charming and imaginative debut collection of poems that deal with the experience of growing up in a world saturated with fantasy and social media. Leigh Stein's fresh and amusing take on the trials of becoming an adult will appeal to the 'Lost Generation' of unemployed and underemployed twenty-somethings searching for meaning in a world of harsh reality. A fresh and innovative collection from the brilliant young author of The Fallback Plan (Melville House, 2012).

Dispatch from the Future

"[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 Exams An MSN Best Book of 2016 Set 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 Jason's 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 wasn't always good to her.

Land of Enchantment

Fates collide after a tarot influencer disappears from a decaying Hollywood mansion in this unnerving gothic mystery and “incisive social satire” (Town & Country) from the acclaimed author of Self Care. “Leigh Stein’s work provokes you like the most unsettling clip you’ve ever seen on a screen—and you won’t be able to look away.”—Julia Phillips, bestselling author of Bear 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 Becca’s biggest fans), Dayna begins to build a social media campaign around Becca’s 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. The internet: You may think you’re inhabiting it, but is it really inhabiting you?

Una magistral revisitación de Jean Eyre para el siglo XXI. 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 dela 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. Reseñas: «Magnífica, divertida, emocionante, verdadera.» Gary Shteyngart

Leigh Stein

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