Jess Walter – författare

The Zero is a groundbreaking novel, a darkly comic snapshot of our times that is already being compared to the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller.

From its opening scene—when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he''s shot himself in the head—novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and days when he doesn''t seem to be living his own life at all. The landscape around him is at once fractured and oddly familiar: a world dominated by a Machiavellian mayor, and peopled by gawking celebrities, anguished policemen, and real estate divas hyping the spoils of tragedy. Remy himself has a new girlfriend he doesn''t know, a son who pretends he''s dead, and an unsettling new job chasing a trail of paper scraps for a shadowy intelligence agency. Whether that trail will lead Remy to an elusive terror cell—or send him circling back to himself—is only one of the questions posed by this provocative yet deeply human novel.

Performed by Christopher Graybill

From the highly acclaimed new crime novelist: a story of witness protection, petty thievery, local politics, and murder—set against the turbulent backdrop of the 1980 presidential election

It’s the fall of 1980, the last week before the presidential election that pits the downtrodden Jimmy Carter against the suspiciously sunny Ronald Reagan. In a seedy suburban house in Spokane, a small-time crook formerly from New York, Vince Camden, pockets his weekly allotment of stolen credit cards and heads off to his witness-protection job at a donut shop. A the shop he takes a shine to a regular named Kelly, who works for a local politician. Somehow he finds himself and the politician in a parking lot at three in the morning, giving the slip to a couple of menacing thugs. And then he crosses the path of a young detective—and discovers his credit-scam partner, lying dead in his passport-photo office with a Cheerio-size bullet-hole in his head. No one writing crime novels today tells a story or sketches a character with more freshness or elan than Jess Walter. Citizen Vince is his funniest and grittiest book yet.

In Over Tumbled Graves, Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and author of Citizen Vince and The Zero, confronts our fascination with pathology and murder. A thriller of extraordinary depth and dimension, Over Tumbled Graves follows Caroline Mabry, a Spokane police detective searching for a serial murderer.

“A stunning job of reporting.”—New York Times

On the last hot day of summer in 1992, gunfire cracked over Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho. By the next day three people were dead, and a small war was joined, pitting the full might of Federal law enforcement against one well-armed family. And ever since the standoff ended, Ruby Ridge has been recognized as a dark watershed in our nation’s history.

In Every Knee Shall Bow, Jess Walter leads the reader through the siege in which Vicki Weaver was fatally shot as she stood in the doorway of their cabin, her infant daughter in her arms. The deadly standoff on Ruby Ridge reveals the racism, violence, paranoia, and hatred of government that continue to erupt in places like Waco and Oklahoma City, and Walter’s definitive account is both insightful and deeply moving.

The Financial Lives of the Poets is a comic and heartfelt novel from National Book Award nominee Jess Walter, author of Citizen Vince and The Zero, about how we get to the edge of ruin—and how we begin to make our way back.

Walter tells the story of Matt Prior, who’s losing his job, his wife, his house, and his mind—until, all of a sudden, he discovers a way that he might just possibly be able to save it all.... and have a pretty damn great time doing it.

“Darkly funny, surprisingly tender . . . witheringly dead-on.” — Los Angeles Times

Named one of the year’s best novels by: Time • Salon.com • Los Angeles Times • NPR/Fresh Air • New West • Kansas City Star • St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A comic and heartfelt novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and Cold Millions about how we get to the edge of ruin—and how we begin to make our way back.

What happens when small-time reporter Matthew Prior quits his job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse?

Before long, he wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife''s online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. . . . Until, one night on a desperate two a.m. run to 7-Eleven, he falls in with some local stoners, and they end up hatching the biggest—and most misbegotten—plan yet.

Jess Walter’s first two novels, OVER TUMBLED GRAVES and LAND OF THE BLIND, have garnered truly extraordinary acclaim from all quarters for their strong characterizations and original stories. Each of them was a BookSense 76 selection and an Amazon.com Penzler Pick, and each garnered extraordinary rave reviews in all quarters of the literary world—from mystery writers to literary novelists. Now, to tie in with the new paperback editions of Walter’s National Book Award finalist THE ZERO and Edgar Award-winning CITIZEN VINCE, Harper Perennial is proud to be republishing OVER TUMBLED GRAVES and LAND OF THE BLIND in new, handsomely designed, trade paperback editions.

LAND OF THE BLIND once again features Detective Caroline Mabry of the Spokane Police Department, homicide division. Now burned out and working the weekend night shift, Caroline is confronted with the arrival of an apparently unstable but somehow charming derelict, who proclaims that he has a murder he wants to confess to. At first she dismisses him as a nutcase—but when she discovers that he is in fact Clark Mason, a former wunderkind politician, she agrees to let him write out his confession. Nineteen hours later—with Mason still writing—Caroline finds herself scrambling to investigate his long, progressively darker and more twisted story, which leads not only to a murder but to the story of two men’s intricately intertwined lives.

Fiendishly clever and darkly funny, LAND OF THE BLIND blends suspense with rich characterization and irresistible storytelling.

ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019

From the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, the first collection of short fiction from Jess Walter—a suite of diverse and searching stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit, keen eye, and generosity of spirit that has made him a bookseller and reader favorite

These twelve stories—published over the last five years in Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Playboy, and other publications—veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

We Live in Water is a darkly comic, heartfelt collection of stories from a “ridiculously talented writer” (New York Times), “one of the freshest voices in American literature” (Dallas Morning News).

ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019

From the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, the first collection of short fiction from Jess Walter—a suite of diverse and searching stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit, keen eye, and generosity of spirit that has made him a bookseller and reader favorite

These twelve stories—published over the last five years in Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Playboy, and other publications—veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

We Live in Water is a darkly comic, heartfelt collection of stories from a “ridiculously talented writer” (New York Times), “one of the freshest voices in American literature” (Dallas Morning News).

“One of the most captivating novels of the year.” – Washington Post 

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A Best Book of the Year: Bloomberg | Boston Globe | Chicago Public Library | Chicago Tribune | Esquire | Kirkus | New York Public Library | New York Times Book Review (Historical Fiction) | NPR''s Fresh Air | O Magazine | Washington Post | Publishers Weekly | Seattle Times | USA Today 

A Library Reads Pick | An Indie Next Pick

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins comes another “literary miracle” (NPR)—a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early twentieth century.

An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice,  and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a  kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams.

The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.

Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war?

Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, The Cold Millions is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors” (Boston Globe).

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes—for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous—as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places.

We all live like we’re famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during “the year of my reinvention” finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams.

Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection of short fiction offers a dazzling range of voices, backdrops, and situations. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch, once again “solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds” (Esquire).

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by #1 New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha. 

New York Times bestselling author and “superb storyteller” (Boston Globe), Jess Walter flexes his genre chops and selects twenty short stories that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.