The Empathy Exams | Granta

  • Published: 04/06/2015
  • ISBN: 9781847088420
  • 129x20mm
  • 240 pages

The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison

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.

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

The Author

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 the NewYork Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as a novel, The Gin Closet. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic,Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.

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From the Same Author

Leslie Jamison on Granta.com

In Conversation | The Online Edition

In Conversation

Leslie Jamison & Margo Jefferson

‘The self is the work of art. Criticism puts that self in the service of other art.’

The authors discuss the multiplicity of the self, the idea of necessity, and how to work with what you lack.

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

The Day After Trump Won

Leslie Jamison

‘I feel afraid, and I do not know what to make of yesterday’s belief. I can see that belief like an object shimmering underwater, a kind of relic.’