LAND OF ENCHANTMENT

When Leigh Stein received a call from an unknown number in July 2011, she assumed it was from her ex-boyfriend Jason and let it go to voicemail. He had visited her earlier in the summer on the promise that he had grown into a kinder, more responsible person, only to revert to all of his cruel and manipulative ways. She told herself she was done with him for good this time. When she finally listened to the message it was from Jason's brother. Jason had been killed in a motorcycle accident. He was 23 years old. Jason's death caused Leigh to recall the tumultuous life they shared together, and to confront the complicated feelings she still had for him. Her new memoir, LAND OF ENCHANTMENT, explores the heartbreaking complexity of falling in love with someone who causes so much pain and why the person hurting you the most can also be the most impossible to walk away from. LEIGH STEIN is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan (Melville House 2012.) The Los Angeles Review of Books praised it as being, “ . . . to this generation what Rick Moody's The Ice Storm was to the previous generation, and The Catcher in the Rye before that.” Her poetry collection Dispatch From the Future was also published the same year to great reviews. She has written for Allure, Gawker, Bookforum, The Toast, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and xoJane among other publications. She is the founder of Out of the Binders, Inc., dedicated to increasing the diversity of voices in the media and literary arts, with a focus on female and gender non-conforming writers.