Ashleigh Young is the author of the award-winning essay collection Can You Tolerate This?, as well as a critically acclaimed book of poetry, Magnificent Moon. The recipient of a 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and an Ockham New Zealand Book Award, among other honours, Ashleigh Young is an editor at Victoria University Press, and teaches creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019

WINNER OF A WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZE 2017

'I love this book' MAGGIE NELSON

'An essay collection unlike any I've read' New York Times

In Can You Tolerate This? Ashleigh Young ushers us into her early years, coming of age in a small town in the faraway yet familiar New Zealand, yearning for a larger and more creative life. As Young's perspective expands, a series of historical portraits - a boy with a rare skeletal disease, a French postman who built a stone fortress by hand, a generation of Japanese shut-ins - strike unexpected personal harmonies, as an unselfconscious childhood gives way to painful shyness in adolescence. As we watch Young fall in and out of love, undertake intense physical exercise that masks something deeper, and gradually find herself through her writing, a highly particular psyche comes into view: curious, tender and exacting in her observations of herself and the world around her.

Smart, funny, insightful and unexpected ... perfect 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

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

Young's writing explores fragility and resilience with a visceral, bodily focus

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

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

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

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

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

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.

From the first sentence of this collection 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

Ashleigh Young has the brilliant knack of cutting to the chase while you're not looking, like some kind of reverse pickpocket slipping notes into your bag before dashing away into the crowd. I'll be savouring this book for many years to come, and slipping it into the pockets of unsuspecting friends

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

Reading Ashleigh Young's essays is like meeting an old and much-loved friend at the end of the world after you've been wandering in the wilderness for days, a friend who's so wise and funny and kind and makes you feel so much better about everything that you start thinking, gosh ... I guess ... I guess the apocalypse is actually kind of okay ...

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

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

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

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