Jesse Ball - Autoportrait

Selected Praise for Jesse Ball

The Divers Game

Jesse Ball is a writer of formal mysteriousness and neon moral clarity... His language is spare, strange, and evocative... His themes are human savagery, often state-sanctioned, and human kindness, a thin thread of resistance.The New Yorker

Jesse Ball levels a steely gaze at the very concept of humanity in this three-part novel that introduces the lower-class quads and the rich pats, who treat those below them with impunity. When a group of pats conceals the grisly fate of a young quad girl behind an elaborate festival, you may start to wonder just how different this dystopian world is from our own.The Washington Post

Census

Balls most personal and best to date... A pointabout the beautiful varieties of perception, of experiencemade without sentimentality, burns at the core of the book, and of much of Balls work, which rails against the tedium of consensus, the cruelty of conformity. The New York Times

Census is a vital testament to selfless love; a psalm to commonplace miracles; and a mysterious evolving metaphor. So kind, it aches.

David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

If theres a refrain running through Balls large body of work, its that compassion, kindness and empathy trump rules and authority of any kind... This damning but achingly tender novel holds open a space for human redemption, never mind that we have built our systems against it.

Los Angeles Times

How to Set a Fire and Why

The most remarkable achievement of this novel is its narrative voice... Sometimes, you hear the ghost of Kazuo Ishiguros flat, chilly style. At other times... Borges-like parable cross-pollinates with Margaret Atwoodstyle dystopia.

The Boston Globe

How to Set a Fire and Why is a rare and startling work. Days after I read it, I find that I cant stop thinking about it, and what Ive 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

Silence Once Begun

Absorbing, finely wrought... A piercing tragedy... that combines subtlety and simplicity in such a way that it causes a reader to go carefully, not wanting to miss a word.Helen Oyeyemi,

The New York Times Book Review

Ball enriches his metafictional restlessness with [a] humane curiosity... The language seems aware of the charged space around it, as if one were praying aloud in a darkened, empty church. His characters speak at once lucidly and uncannily; words have become strangely heavy.

James Wood, The New Yorker

Beginning as a work of seeming reportage, Silence Once Begun transforms into a graceful and multifaceted fable on the nature of truth and identity.

Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

autoportrait

ALSO BY JESSE BALL

The Children VI

The Divers Game

Census

The Way Through Doors

Samedi the Deafness

The Curfew

The Lesson

Silence Once Begun

A Cure for Suicide

How to Set a Fire and Why

March Book

The Village on Horseback

Fool Book

Vera & Linus

Og svo kom nottin

Deaths of Henry King

Notes on My Dunce Cap

Sleep, Deaths Brother

For Catherine Lacey

I read douard Levs Autoportrait and found I admire its approach to biography. It is an approach that does not raise one fact above another, but lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life. He wrote it in his thirty-ninth year. In my thirty-ninth year, this book follows his.

autoportrait

To my knowledge, I have never ridden a horse. I have ridden an elephant and a camelwhen I was a child. I have ridden a human being. I have been carried while asleep and rolled on a gurney. When I was four or three I cracked my head open on a pillar. Meanwhile my brother rode his tricycle down a hill, forcing my mother to choose between us. She chose my brother. When I was six, I cut my arm in half on a glass window. The cut was lengthwise and my arm fell open like the bottom had been knocked out of a bucket. I was in the middle of a birthday party, my own, when it happened. It was comically my fault. All the other children cried at once like a chorus. Next to the place where that happened, a neighborhood boy once hit me in the face with a wiffle ball bat. He never apologized or explained why he did it and I was neither angry nor required an explanation. Perhaps we intuitively sawthings dont have explanations. I find watering plants to be onerous, and gardens even more so, but worse than that I find raking leaves, grass, or soil. I like yards to be overgrown. On the other hand I like to keep my living space in careful order, although I dont mind if it is dirty. I myself am often dirty and do not like to wash. As a boy, I would pretend to take showers by turning the water on and lightly splashing my arms. I love to take baths, however, and will do so many days in a row, if it is possible. I am frustrated by the smallness of tubs, despite the fact that I am not particularly tall. For a long time I believed I was six feet tall. I am between five foot eleven and six feet tall, but am certainly not six feet tall. When I was a boy, one of my legs was two inches longer than the other. One month everything was fine. Shortly thereafter, I had to have surgery. The options were the following: make one leg shorter by stopping its growth, or make one leg longer by breaking it in several places. I chose to be shorter, but I have often thought about how my life would have been different, particularly when reading those statistical analyses of wage disparity relative to height. I like to swim, but not for exercise. I dont like to do anything for exercise. I ran away from home a couple times, but never got far. I hate the sun and try to stay out of it at all times. This led me to lead much of my adulthood in the nighttime, though of course, I must naturally be out and about during the day, whether I like it or not. I am a parasomniacsleepwalking. I used to sleep-talk, but stopped one day. I have night terrors and have had them since around 1990 when my brother went to the hospital and was there made quadriplegic. I have migraines, sometimes once or twice in a week, sometimes not for a month. When I do, I vomit and roll on the floor like a dog. I have had many concussions. When I was eight I was in the street and a car struck me. My mother was watching. She told the driver, you hit my boy. While saying this she realized the woman was a slight acquaintance of hers. My body was thrown some feet through the air. The reason I was in the road waswe were walking into town to buy a mechanical bird, a kind of flapping glider that could be wound up. When later I obtained it, the mechanical bird gave me no pleasure. I was left back in kindergarten and put into special education because I cannot concentrate. There are psychological documents based upon medical examinations showing that my intense hyperactivity was related to brain damage. As an adult, my specialty is concentrating, but I still cannot choose what to concentrate on. I am always ready to run and hide in the woods, if it is necessary. In such a situation, I will never be the person who is taken unawares. I did not sleep with a woman until I was twenty-two, and I believe that I confused many women in the years prior. They must have thought I wasnt interested in them. In fact, I was completely timid, but only in this regard. In all other cases, I was confident, even aggressive. The girl I slept with tricked me into her room by telling me we were going to play video games. When we got there she told me that there were no video games. She was half Mexican and a tree had recently fallen on her car. I have tried every drug I could get my hands on, but not in a social way. I was just curious about ways I could feel. Two I found best: injecting heroin, smoking DMT. I do not have an addictive personality. The phrase