Can You Tolerate This?: Ashleigh Young - Tapa blanda

Smart, funny, insightful and unexpected ... perfect summer reading (Jon McGregor, Guardian Summer Reading)

These are thoughtful, searching pieces, both open to the world and temperamentally uneasy. They handle their subjects with generosity and a restlessness that seeps in like floodwater (New Yorker)

This prize-winning collection of essays goes deep into exploring isolation, shyness and the limitations of the body ... all through [Young's] singular observations of the world, and of the tensions that define our lives (Elle 'Ultimate Summer Reads')

Young's writing explores fragility and resilience with a visceral, bodily focus (Vogue '13 Books to Thrill, Entertain and Sustain You This Summer')

Extremely charming ... She can be funny, self-effacing and romantic, but most impressive are her extraordinary powers of observation, as if God hotwired a microscope and a movie camera into her brain. With the most elegant, evocative prose, she invites us to move in with her and her family, and seems so wise about so many things I could hardly believe she was real. A wonderful book, an irresistible woman (Big Issue)

Wry, confessional, understated and often hilarious. Each piece lifts you up and deposits you in a place you never expected to find yourself. They startle with their immediacy and candour; they offer comfort even as they ask you to see things anew. Young is a sharp observer who revels in her sense of the absurd using precise language and striking images ... Young, like the best essayists, writes with humorous self-regard about her own lived small moments, which reveal as much about us as they do about her. The intimacy of her stories creates a connection, making even a foreign place feel like home (Washington Post)

Young's voice is soothing, unsure and searching as she narrates her childhood in provincial New Zealand and pokes into the lives of those who populated it - her father, her brother, her chiropractor. Can You Tolerate This? asks its titular question at every turn, and the answer always seems to be yes (Paris Review)

Young shows how many ways we will bend but not break. And, moreover, that the ways we find to write about these transformative states of being might help us to make some sense of them; might develop a language that links images and experiences we have no other way of holding together . Young's essays are insightful and exquisitely sensitive . that unfold carefully in language that is measured and nuanced (Emily LaBarge, The White Review)

In a book landscape of spectacle-driven nonfiction narratives, I am finding respite in Ashleigh Young's perceptive and smart debut, Can You Tolerate This? It's a collection of essays no less ambitious, sobering, or wide-ranging than the avalanche of social justice texts, but written with the tenderness and precision of a dentist who doesn't use anesthesia (LitHub)

Compelling, exhilarating ... The essays center around the body, our first, last, and always home in the world, and the ways in which its limitations force us to find accommodations, force us to come to terms with our own strengths and frailties, as well as those of the people - all those other frail, strong bodies - around us. (Nylon)