Praise for and Quotes from How to Set a Fire and Why
"In an age of blandly interchangeable YA narrators, this novel is 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 Excerpts: "We deceive ourselevs into thinking that life is long, but fire reminds us it is a flickering. Life is a flickering - and then it is gone." "I guess real things happen all at once, and then you go back to the fake parade of garbage that characterizes modern life." “When I think about what my future holds, it is a bit like looking into the sun. I flinch away, or I don’t and my eyes get burned down a bit, like candles, and then I can’t see for a while.” -Jesse Ball |
Praise for and Quotes from A Cure for Suicide
"This turns out to be a love story about a penniless man and a rich, dying woman, and it's one of the finest things Ball has ever written, a magical, gripping burst of emotional history, which interrogates the book's ultimate subject, suicide and the desire for oblivion. 'If animals excel us, defeat us in one thing," he writes wonderingly, "it is this: they all want their lives. Life is given to each one of them separately, and they all want it. We do not.'" -Charles Finch, The New Yorker "There is yearning at the core of “A Cure for Suicide,” and in that yearning is the reason for carrying on when doing so feels impossible. Ball asks whether, given the chance to shed our pain and start over with the mind of a child, we would want to do so — to what extent pain informs identity, and what parts of us would remain were we to shed that pain. ...Ball deftly explores questions with the eye of a poet and the logic of a philosopher, revealing new facets with perfect timing and acuity." -Sarah Gerard, The New York Times “It is an enduring satisfaction for our species to make little systems and tend to them.” -Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide |
Praise for and Quotes from Silence Once Begun "In this book Ball the poet and novelist joins forces with “Ball” the lovelorn journalist to relate a piercing tragedy in a language 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 "Ball has built in a few genuinely surprising twists that exist solely because of how the story is structured. That's an accomplishment; Silence Once Begun is a fascinating project in which almost everything is stripped away but the contradictory stories people tell." -Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times “Our knowledge about ourselves is our least reliable knowledge. Yet, so thoroughly do we ordinarily champion our own cause that it is acknowledged effective to believe that a person who deems it impossible to any further champion his/her own cause must be guilty.” -Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun |