Jesse Ball is the author of four previous novels, including Silence Once Begun and Samedi the Deafness, and several works of verse, bestiaries, and sketchbooks. He has been named a finalist for the 2015 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and a 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Ball received an NEA creative writing fellowship for 2014 and the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, and his verse has been included in the Best American Poetry series. In his fifth novel, A Cure for Suicide (Pantheon Books) —a Longlist selection for a 2015 National Book Award in Fiction—a woman “examiner” and a man, her “claimant,” move into a small house where the examiner teaches the claimant the most simple functions and monitors his progress, until an encounter at a party raises doubts about everything he has learned.

NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015