THE PAIN OF PLEASURE

Amy Grace Loyd's atmospheric and erotic new novel traces the storms inside us, between us, and around us. Set in a headache clinic in the basement of an abandoned church in Brooklyn during unprecedented extremes of weather, it explores the intimate terrain of human pain and pleasure, how our bodies can collude with us and against us, mislead us all the way to addiction and emotional and sexual obsession. Loyd describes the storms inside, between, and around us as we struggle to survive an age of near-constant upheaval and climate change.

The story follows an increasingly fevered entanglement of perspectives: those of the Doctor, a man outrunning his desires; Ruth, the nurse hired by the clinic's domineering patron to spy on the Doctor; and Sarah, a former patient, who has gone missing but left behind her journal days before vanishing. Ruth becomes fascinated with Sarah after reading her journal, which chronicles an affair she had with a married man. Here, the reader becomes a voyeur, watching as Sarah explores her sexuality and whether it can help solve not only her chronic pain but the loneliness it caused her. Ruth, like the Doctor, tries to unravel the mystery of Sarah's disappearance. But nothing goes to planfor Sarah, the Doctor, or Ruth, who's already in exile from everyone and everything she once knew. At once interior and expansive, timely and transcendent, The Pain of Pleasure investigates the human psyche with intelligence and intimacy and offers readers a hopeful imagining of what we hold on to when the storms keep coming. Amy Grace Loyd is an editor, teacher, and author of the novel The Affairs of Others, a BEA Buzz Book and Indie Next selection. She began her career at independent book publisher W.W. Norton & Company and The New Yorker, in the magazine's fiction and literary department. She was the associate editor on the New York Review Books Classics series and the fiction and literary editor at Playboy magazine and later at Esquire. She's also worked in digital publishing, as an executive editor at e-singles publisher Byliner and as an acquiring editor and content creator for Scribd Originals. She has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University MFA writing program and a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow. She lives between New York and New Hampshire.