JESSE BALL (1978- ). Born in New York. The author of fourteen books, most recently the novel How to Set a Fire and Why. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
"A high-spirited, edgy coming-of-age novel... Ball has created a
voice that echoes the beloved narrators of J.D. Salinger and John
Green... With her tragic past, brilliant mind and subversive
potential, Lucia could be thought of as a young Lisbeth Salander,
or a high-IQ, antiheroic Katniss Everdeen, but with a better sense
of humor... This is perfect summer reading."
--Marion Wink, Newsday "The most remarkable achievement of this
novel is its narrative voice. It belongs to Lucia Stanton, the
novel's disaffected, Holden Caulfield-style young narrator and
heroine. Lucia is a marvelous creation and the richness of her
voice -- its intelligence, its casual precision -- is felt on the
very first page.... Sometimes, you hear the ghost of Kazuo
Ishiguro's flat, chilly style. At other times... Borges-like
parable cross-pollinates with Margaret Atwood-style dystopia."
--Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe "Extremely well done: swift,
sharp-tongued and enlivened by cockeyed humor."
--The Wall Street Journal How to Set a Fire and Why is a rare
and startling work. Days after I read it, I find that I can't stop
thinking about it, and what I've realized is that this is a book I
will not forget. This is a harrowing, subtle, and absolutely
electrifying novel.
--Emily St. John Mandel, bestselling author of Station
Eleven "Characterized by Ball's stand-out prose, this book will
find you in the deepest places."
--Bustle "In Jesse Ball's sixth novel--part thriller, part
coming-of-age story--a teenager seeks escape through fire. . . .
One of the triumphs of the novel is the delicacy with which Ball
opens his narrator's smart-aleck voice just wide enough to admit a
sincere measure of wonder and dread. . . . Ball calls himself a
fabulist but he is also a deeply moral writer, with a fine sense of
tragedy. His view of the world might be described as tender
nihilism. . . . Ball's novels, despite their gamesmanship, eerie
mysteries, and senseless acts of violence, are ultimately
celebrations of compassion--our best hedge against suffering. . . .
He poses an alternative vision of reality, filled with grand
conspiracies united against oppressive systems of rule, Byzantine
puzzles that can be solved with ingenuity, and romantic acts of
heroism. His fiction is suffused with a melancholy that derives
from the knowledge that the real world is indifferent to such
elegant fantasies. . . . Ball invites his readers to join a secret
confederacy that rejects modern life's false parade of garbage. It
is a confederacy that accepts the implacable demands of entropy and
death but nevertheless seeks comfort in puzzle-solving, the
exhilaration of a caper, and selfless acts of compassion."
--Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic "Ball's surreal novels...
have made him into one of the most acclaimed experimental writers
to come out of Chicago in years. Ball, who was just named a
Guggenheim fellow, creates worlds that exist somewhere between the
known and the unknown, the real and the absurd... His work has
garnered attention... for its ingenious depictions of
well-intentioned characters who must negotiate difficult mazes of
tragedy and the unending tangles of unjust social systems....
Ball's work is as spellbinding as it is daring."
--Joe Meno, Chicago Magazine " "In Ball's latest imaginative
and provocative novel, Lucia seizes her place among American
literature's brainy, questioning, besieged, and determined young
female narrators...Ball's pitch-perfect voicing is mesmerizing as
Lucia chronicles her experiences to help her make sense of her
predicament. A pithy, deadpan-funny, scalpel-sharp, and, beneath
her flinty adolescent bravura, deeply compassionate observer, Lucia
recounts her increasingly harrowing misadventures and presents a
fiery manifesto... Readers will share Ball's adoration of this
incisive and valiant young survivor from whom life cruelly
subtracts nearly everything but her incandescent intellect, blazing
wit, and radiant sense of justice."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist (STARRED review) "Immediately
intriguing... Lucia's curation of the truth is the only one the
reader knows. Ball's convincing connection with what it is to be a
teenager is aided by the fact that Lucia is atypical... Her
peculiar brand of nonconformity remains true to the nature of
teen... but she also has a level of erudition and knowing that
allows for great insight... All that's written, all Lucia's actions
and decisions, seem not just believable but somehow right...There's
beauty in the simplicity, in the story that's told, in the plight
of one girl to find what's true."
--Emma Young, The Sydney Morning Herald "Lucia is a
seriously troubled teen girl, ready to burn it all to the ground,
who has her world entirely changed when she discovers the Arson
Club at her new school. Covering questions of morality, choice, and
destruction, the novel hits a chord with the rebellious, feeling,
overwhelmed teen in all of us."
--Elena Sheppard, HelloGiggles "Jesse Ball has written an
unforgettably memorable character in the pyromaniac Lucia, who
anyone who was once a cynical teenager will recognize and relate
to."
--Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed " The beautifully blunt narration of a
gifted delinquent propels this excellent sixth novel.... Lucia
details a philosophy that smartly parallels the novel's
own--namely, that writing literature is, like arson, an act of
creation and destruction.... Thrilling.... A song of teenage
heartbreak sung with a movingly particular sadness, a mature
meditation on how actually saying something, not just speaking, is
what most makes a voice human.
--Publishers Weekly (STARRED and BOXED review) "Told by a
teenage protagonist who can't manage to stay in school in spite of
her knack for seeing straight through to the truth that underlies
things. She's a lovable misfit worth hanging out with."
--Maddie Crum, The Huffington Post "A troubled adolescent
girl dreams of setting fire to the world. It starts with a stabbing
and ends with a conflagration, and, in between, the novel never
once telegraphs where it's going... It's never quite what you
expected. In this stark epistolary novel, the author fully occupies
the inner life of a teenage girl, Lucia Stanton... A brilliant
portrayal of a girl who's quite aware of what she's going
through."
-Kirkus Reviews "I was captivated from the first line.
Introducing the teenage narrator of Jesse Ball's novel How to
Set a Fire and Why: Lucia. Who can't stay in high school, who
lives in a converted garage with her broke and eccentric aunt,
whose garden is boisterously weedy, whose mother is in a mental
institution, whose father is dead, and who always tells the truth
about what matters. Lucia belongs with all the great child truth
tellers: David Copperfield, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield. She has a
rapier wit, an infallible nose for hypocrisy and injustice, and is
always in trouble. She is subversive and funny and has a capacity
for love that outstrips her circumstances. And she is much smarter
than most of the plodding adults around her. Her manifesto on arson
read a little like parts of Walden. I loved her and I loved the
book, every page of it."
--Peter Heller, bestselling author of The Dog Stars and
The Painter "If you didn't know Ball's off-kilter,
engagingly experimental writing by the time 2014's Silence Once
Begun became a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and
the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, surely you started reading him
when last year's A Cure for Silence was long-listed for the
National Book Award. And here's another chance... Her father dead
and her mother institutionalized, sharp-tongued, sharp-witted Lucia
lives with her aunt and gets herself thrown out of school after
school. At the latest one, she's drawn to the secret Arson Club, a
great place to meet like-minded teenagers, but you know it sounds
bad."
--Library Journal
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