“Retail
From personal loss to phantom diseases, a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014
Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamisons visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel anothers pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting painreal and imagined, her own and othersJamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territoryfrom poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarcerationin its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.
Review Praise for The Empathy Exams:
" The Empathy Exams is 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 of The Luminaries , winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize
"Leslie Jamison threads her fine mind through the needle of emotion, sewing our desire for feeling to our fear of feeling. Her essays pierce both pain and sweetness. " Eula Biss
"Leslie Jamison has written a profound exploration into how empathy deepens us, yet how we unwittingly sabotage our own capacities for it. We care because we are porous, she says. Pain is at once actual and constructed, feelings are made based on how you speak them. This riveting book will make you a better writer, a better human. "Mary Karr
**
" The Empathy Exams is a necessary book, a brilliant antidote to the noise of our time. Intellectually rigorous, it's also plainly personal, honest and intimate, clear-eyed about its confusions. It's about the self as something other than a bundle of symptoms, it's about female pain and the suffering of solitary souls everywhere, it's an exploration of empathy and the poverty of our imaginations, it's ultimately about the limits of language and the liberating possibilities of a whole new narrative. . . . The Empathy Exams earns its place on the shelf alongside Sontag. "Charles D'Ambrosio
"These essaysrisky, brilliant, and full of heartricochet between what it is to be alive and to be a creature wondering what it is to be alive. Jamison's words, torqued to a perfect balance, shine brightly, allowing both fury and wonder to open inside us. "Nick Flynn
"Leslie Jamison positions herself in one fraught subject position after the next: tourist in the suffering of others, guilt-ridden person of privilege, keenly intelligent observer distrustful of pure cleverness, reclaimer and critic of female suffering, to name but a few. She does so in order to probe her endlessly important and difficult subjectempathy, for the self and for othersa subject this whirling collection of essays turns over rock after rock to explore. Its perambulations are wide-ranging; its attentiveness to self and others, careful and searching; its open heart, true. "Maggie Nelson
"Leslie Jamison writes with her whole heart and an unconfined intelligence, a combination that gives The Empathy Exams an inquiry into modern ways and problems of feelinga persuasive, often thrilling authority. These essays reach out for the world, seeking the extraordinary, the bizarre, the alone, the unfeeling, and finding always what is human. "Michelle Orange
"Brilliant. At times steel-cold or chili-hot, [Jamison] picks her way through a society that has lost its way, a voyeur of voyeurism. Here now comes the post-Sontag, post-modern American essay. "Ed Vulliamy, author of Amexica: War Along the Borderline
"When we chance upon a work and a writer who summons and dares the full tilt of all her volatile resources, intellectual and emotional, personal and historical, the effect is, well, disorienting, astonishing. We crash into wonder, as she says, and the span of topics Jamison tosses up is correspondingly smashing and wondrous: medical actors, sentimentality, violence, plastic surgery, guilt, diseases, the Barkley Marathons, stylish 'ex-votos' for exemplary artists, incarceration, wounds, scars, fear, yearning, community, and the mutations of physical pain. "Robert Polito, from his Afterword
About the Author Leslie Jamison is the author of a novel, The Gin Closet , which was a finalist for theLos Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her essays have appeared in Believer , Harpers Magazine , Oxford American , and Tin House . Sheli”
2014-11-17 (ol_source: 2022-07-19, isbndb_scrape: 2022-09-01, lgli_source: 2021-06-18, zlib_source: 2019-04-08, lgrsfic_source: 2014-11-17)
