Jesse Ball


Jesse Ball is an American novelist and poet. He has published novels, volumes of poetry, short stories, and drawings. His works are distinguished by the use of a spare style and have been compared to those of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.

Career

Ball's reputation as a leading American novelist was first made in 2007 and 2008 with the arrival of the critically acclaimed Samedi the Deafness and then the novella The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr. The latter won the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize. He followed up that success in 2009 with The Way Through Doors, and in 2011, The Curfew, whose style The New Yorker described as " at some oscillating coordinate between Kafka and Calvino: swift, intense fables composed of equal parts wonder and dread."
His career and his 2014 book Silence Once Begun were reviewed by the literary critic James Wood in The New Yorker in February 2014. In 2015, he was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lion Prize . Later that year, he published A Cure for Suicide, which was long listed for the National Book Award.
In 2017, Granta included him on their list of Best Young American Novelists. On June 30 of that year Ball published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times suggesting that all American citizens be incarcerated periodically, as a civic duty. The article likens this incarceration to already existing jury duty and states that no one, not even sitting politicians, judges or military officers would be free from it.
Ball's The Divers' Game'' made it on The Best Books of 2019 by The New Yorker. Staff writer Katy Waldman provides a brief synopsis of the novel that includes, "This dystopic fable imagines a society riven in two, with the upper class empowered to murder members of the lower class, for any reason."

Personal life

Ball was born into a middle-class, English-speaking Irish-Sicilian family in Port Jefferson, New York, on Long Island. Ball's father worked in Medicaid; his mother worked in libraries. His brother, Abram, was born with Down's syndrome and attended a school some distance from the place where they lived. Ball attended Port Jefferson High School, and matriculated at Vassar College.
Following Vassar, Ball attended Columbia University, where he earned an MFA and met the poet Richard Howard. Howard helped the then 24-year-old poet publish his first volume, March Book, with Grove Press.
In Iceland, Ball met Thordis Bjornsdottir, a poet and author who he collaborated with on two books, married, and later divorced. Ball and the writer Catherine Lacey have been partners since 2016.
Ball has lived for ten years in Chicago. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches courses on lying, ambiguity, dreaming, and walking.

Works