As heard on NPR Morning Edition
Best Jewish Poetry Book of the Year - Alma
"Smart, honest, vulnerable, and really really beautiful. It feels like the book for this exact moment." - Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence
”What To Miss When is hilarious and absolutely horrifying. If you think the quarantine habits you developed are unique and charming, read this book to be put in your place. But I beg of you, gift that to yourself, it'll make you feel less alone. ‘I'm a feminist, I got the memo,’ is Stein's perfect disclaimer when shouting the things so many of us are afraid to even whisper. It's a specific kind of book that helps us remember how things were, that serves as a map for our children to understand why we are the way we are. This book is one of them.” —Olivia Gatwood, author of Life of the Party
“Early on, the speaker says she ‘must be some basic bitch to click / ‘Decameron and Chill?’ in Town and Country,’ and we know we’re in for a ride through the pandemic that has some ‘mischief’ in it. It’s this mischief, Stein’s relentlessly refreshing humor about the ‘new normal’—equal parts rueful self-deprecation and excoriating cultural critique—that makes this book such a worthy artifact of the American experience of the pandemic.” —Jason Koo, founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets
“Highbrow brilliant”
—New York Magazine
One of the 10 Best Pop Fiction Titles of 2020—Library Journal
One of the Fifteen Best Books Our Book Critic Read this Year—VOX
"[An] extremely enjoyable, pitch-perfect satire of this brand of feminism that reached its apogee before the election. [It's] a blistering satire of internet social dynamics, of the way social justice critique can be a tool of interpersonal warfare. It's so well-timed and so well done. While I was reading it, there were long stretches of time where I forgot about the hell world we were living in."—Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times Argument podcast
“Self Care proves Leigh Stein’s status as a great ‘demolition expert’ (Kenneth Tynan’s term for Bernard Shaw) of the influencer era.”—The New Republic
"Just try not to snort your Moon Juice out your nose while laughing your ass off."—Refinery29
“A brutal dissection of ‘Insta-worthy’ culture, the unconscionable capitalistic impulses behind wellness ventures, and the farce of forced community building.”—Vulture
"Brutal and brutally funny...Stein presents a punchy, bracing criticism of modern feminism's transformation into a commercialized hellscape of goat yoga, healing crystals, and 'girl bosses.'"—Esquire
“This is the self-aware callout culture novel that we need, but don't deserve.” —Salon
One of PopSugar's Best Books of 2016
A Reading with Robin Favorite of 2016
A Junior Library Guild Selection for Adult Book with Teen Appeal
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.
“Fantastic…riveting and thought-provoking. The way she writes, it makes you want to write, or at least that’s what it did for me. The moment I finished reading, I wanted to pick up a pen and write.” — Emma Roberts in Vogue
"In seductively polished and sensory language, Stein turns a slice of her past into a narrative that feels real enough to touch, and in doing so confronts readers with the traumatic truth of grief, intimate partner violence, emotional abuse, and even the more mundane pain of first heartbreak. Beware of crying at the tiki bar, but it’s worth it to be consumed by such a propulsive and haunting memoir." — Huffington Post
"Extraordinary … The book should be required reading." — The Albuquerque Journal
"[Stein] writes beautifully and openly about what it was like to be in an abusive relationship … This well-crafted memoir easily jumps back and forth in time, never leaving the reader behind but always leaving them wanting to know more." — The Portland Mercury
"Leigh Stein’s Land of Enchantment is a thoughtful and compelling elegy to a troubled man, a broken love, and a broken dream of the west. It’s about loss, wonder, and the vexed grip of attachment. It grieves by way of admitting complexity—by answering the late-night knock of unfinished business—and its spell is immersive: Once I’d picked it up, I did not set it down again until I’d finished it." – Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams
"Leigh Stein has written an engrossing account of young love, the lesser-told kind, whose enchantment is more poison than panacea. In clean, unencumbered prose, she unspools a story both ordinary and acute, proof that some kinds of violence are harder to name and leave no bruises, though their impressions never fade. I wish I could give this memoir to my younger self, and to all those smart, deeply feeling girls who so easily mistake intensity for intimacy. Stein's story does not simplify the romance of destructive love and assures us that if we can emerge from such trials, there is nothing to regret. Their lessons leave us more whole, not less." —Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me
"One of the most compelling memoirs I've ever read. A mesmerizing requiem on loss and love, Stein's intelligent ode to adolescent obsession is unflinching in its honest portrayal of what it means to give ourselves over to the dark side of love. This is a glittering gem of a book." – Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance
Highbrow brilliant - New York magazine
A hilarious debut novel about the tricky period between graduating from college and moving out of your parents’ house
“Beautiful, funny, thrilling and true.” —Gary Shteyngart
“Has a universal quality, capturing a generation’s angst quite like Franny and Zooey did when it was published in 1961.” — Chicago Tribune
“The Fallback Plan is to this generation what Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm was to the previous generation, and The Catcher in the Rye before that.”—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Review of Books
“27-year-old former New Yorker staffer Leigh Stein nails the latest postcollegiate trend—moving back in with Mom and Dad… Stein seems poised to become the Lena Dunham of contemporary fiction, given the way The Fallback Plan’s storyline deftly bears with it a steady commentary on today’s flatlining economy and a generation of college grads (an estimated 85 percent of the class of 2011 moved right back home) who have to wonder if we’ll ever actually grow up and become real adults.” —ELLE Magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST SUMMER BOOKS OF 2012
RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB PICK
Post-confessional—like Sylvia Plath raised on MTV, or Anne Sexton on Twitter—the poems seduce with a narrative hook or startle with a pop culture reference, all the while wrestling fresh meaning out of our fantasy-saturated modern lives.
"Stein possesses a comic's honesty and sense of timing, simultaneously enchanting and dark, yet never cynical. She's already published a wonderful debut novel this year, but I think she's arguably an even better poet. —Publishers Weekly
"These poems will charm the pants off of you with their irreverence, insight, and optimism" —Guernica
"By showing us that it’s possible to make something beautiful and funny out of our supposed follies, Stein rescues the present." —The Poetry Foundation
"The poems, like Stein’s debut novel, The Fallback Plan ... strike a powerful balance between humor and melancholy, reference and storytelling. A startlingly developed and fearless voice." —The Rumpus
”I love these poems.” —Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine
“Leigh Stein’s poems know how to laugh it off after a stunning tumble down a flight of stairs.” —Rob MacDonald, editor of Sixth Finch
"Dispatch from the Future is a force of nature. Like other great American poets before her—Bernadette Mayer, Jorie Graham, William Carlos Williams come to mind—Leigh Stein is not afraid to make the everyday beautiful. As if she says in these poems, "Don’t worry, we all feel this way.' We do. Read this book." – Dorothea Lasky