Synopses & Reviews
AS A YOUNG WOMAN, Tilly flees home for the hollow underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. One day, after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family, drinking herself to the brink of death, her niece Stella—who has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City—arrives on the doorstep of Tilly’s desert trailer. The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between them. With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison reminds us that no matter how unexpected its turns, the life we’re given is all we have: the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.
Review
"Devastating...astonishing...a story of love and ruin in the American West...it is a book that finds beauty in dysfunction- and, in doing so, gives us one of the truest and most devastating depictions of alcoholism to be had in some time...exquisite prose...droll...a tour de force." —Karen Brady, Buffalo News
Review
“Life is raw in Leslie Jamison’s astonishing first novel, a story of love and ruin in the American West…it is a book that finds beauty in dysfunction—and, in doing so, gives us one of the truest and most devastating depictions of alcoholism to be had in some time…
The Gin Closet is nothing short of a tour de force.”
—Buffalo News
Review
“Keenly felt...Redemption, finds Jamison, like love, is rarely pure or unambiguous.”
—Vogue
Synopsis
Urgent and auspicious debut novel told in the voices of a young woman and her alcoholic aunt.
Synopsis
From the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams and the memoir The Recovering, Leslie Jamison's "exquisitely beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle) novel about three generations of women and the inescapable brutality of love.As a young woman, Tilly flees home for the hollow underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. One day, after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family, drinking herself to the brink of death, her niece Stella--who has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City--arrives on the doorstep of Tilly's desert trailer. The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between them. With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison reminds us that no matter how unexpected its turns, the life we're given is all we have: the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.
Synopsis
From the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams and the memoir The Recovering, Leslie Jamison's "exquisitely beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle) novel about three generations of women and the inescapable brutality of love. As a young woman, Tilly flees home for the hollow underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. One day, after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family, drinking herself to the brink of death, her niece Stella--who has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City--arrives on the doorstep of Tilly's desert trailer. The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between them. With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison reminds us that no matter how unexpected its turns, the life we're given is all we have: the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.
About the Author
Leslie Jamison was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Los Angeles. She has worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa’s Workshop, she is currently finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale. She is the bestselling author of The Empathy Exams, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, Oxford America, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Powell's Books on PowellsBooks.Blog
Thirty-three-year-old Carmen Maria Machado is a bit of a wunderkind, prestigious enough to warrant a Wikipedia page, but too young for it to be much more than a list of her accomplishments...
Read More»