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. -The New Yorker From the first sentence onward, you know Ashleigh Young is here to deliver cool, compelling, surprising sentences, which add up to beautiful, unusual, and memorable essays. I love this book. -Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts and The Red Parts Tender, witty, and endowed with a penetrating emotional acuity, Ashleigh Young's evocative essays gaze out into the world, searching it for moments of connection and clues to the true nature of our curious, fragile humanity. This is a book to hold close and fall in love with. -Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations In prose witty and tender, Ashleigh Young sings the body problematic, as well as the questions of how to live in it: both with others and in solitude. This book made me feel less alone. -Melissa Broder, author of So Sad Today and The Pisces Yes! This is what I've wanted essays to be-character studies, maps, shrines, elegies, these forms that are mysterious, synaptic creatures. At the center of each of Ashleigh Young's tender studies of isolation and place there is a heart, how it pulses. -Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines and Green Girl Ashleigh Young's Can You Tolerate This? should be required reading for every woman. In this stunning and unforgettable collection, Young grapples with the question so many women face on a daily basis: how much can our bodies take? A fierce and unsentimental look at the power and pain and beauty and struggle that are the costs and benefits of being embodied. - Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World and Poster Child Praise for Ashleigh Young : Calling to mind both Joan Didion and Anton Chekov, Young is relentless in her examination of herself and endlessly curious and compassionate in her consideration of the world. Can You Tolerate This? offers a glimpse into this extraordinarily promising writer's quest to seek in the small accidents of her individual life the outlines of a much larger reality. -Windham-Campbell Award, judges' panel If Ashleigh Young was a band, I'd wear the T-shirt. -Sunday Star-Times A work of resonant literary art. . . . naked, beautiful essays about self and its exoskeletons, where one is and where one longs to be. -Australian Book Review sakriti opis