Jesse Ball is a poet and novelist. His novels include The Way Through Doors (2009) and Samedi the Deafness (2007), which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. He has published books of poetry and prose, The Village on Horseback (2010), Vera & Linus (2006), March Book (2004). A book of his drawings, Og svo kom nottin, appeared in Iceland in 2006. He won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize in 2008 for The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr. His poetry has appeared in the Best American Poetry series. He is an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches classes on lying, lucid dreaming and general practice.
“[A] brilliant work of speculative fiction that calls to mind
Kafka’s The Trial, Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading and, most
prominently, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.” —New City Chicago
“Few authors have the guts or the skill to pull off a book like
this.” —Time Out Chicago
“There is a hushed and elegiac quality to this nocturne of a novel.
. . . Ball possesses a remarkably mythic sensibility, achieving a
spare yet merciful mode that brings Borges, Calvino, and Simic to
mind. Solemn beauty, beguiling invention, and unnerving insights
into insidious tyranny and terror and depthless sorrow make for a
haunting dystopian tale.” —Booklist
“[A] delicately etched nightmare.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Jesse Ball once again manages to deliver a devastating blow with a
deceptively small package. In his third novel, father and daughter
William and Molly live as happy a life as they can under a shady,
authoritarian regime. The horrors are only hinted at in Ball's
poetic and economic style, but the love among family shines through
it all.” —AM New York
“Written in clipped and brutal prose . . . [the] narrative is
buoyed by nuanced characters. . . . Ball’s ideas and heart make
this a very compelling read.” —Publisher’s Weekly
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