Jesse Ball

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."

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.

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.

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 (also for Silence Once Begun). Later that year, he published A Cure for Suicide, which was long listed for the National Book Award.

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 "[lying] at some oscillating coordinate between Kafka and Calvino: swift, intense fables composed of equal parts wonder and dread."

Jesse Ball (born June 7, 1978) 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.