Jesse Ball Books in Order

If you want the most emotional place to begin: Census → Autoportrait
If you like conspiracies and quiet dread: Samedi the Deafness → Silence Once Begun → The Repeat Room
If you want bleak dystopian fiction: The Curfew → A Cure for Suicide → The Divers' Game
If you want a fierce teenage voice: How to Set a Fire and Why
If you want something brief and strange: The Lesson → Sleep, Death's Brother

Jesse Ball was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and grew up on Long Island in a family where books and public service mattered. His father worked in Medicaid, his mother worked in libraries, and his brother Abram, who had Down syndrome, was a central part of his life. That mix of close observation, care, and ordinary daily work runs through much of what Ball writes.

He began as a poet. At Vassar College he was already making and binding his own small books by hand, passing them around before he had any formal standing as a writer. After college he went to Columbia University for an MFA, where he met the poet Richard Howard, who helped him publish March Book, an early collection that helped launch his writing career.

From the start, he was drawn to fiction that bends reality rather than sits still inside it.

Ball spent stretches of time in Europe as a younger writer, including in France, Scotland, and Iceland. Those years abroad sit in the background of books whose settings often feel hard to pin to one place. His fiction regularly takes place in worlds that seem familiar at first, then tilt just enough to make every rule feel uncertain.

That energy is there in the early novels that first brought many readers to him. Samedi the Deafness begins with a dying man's last word and turns into a strange conspiracy story about lies, memory, and responsibility. The Way Through Doors opens with an accident and an amnesiac woman, then keeps unfolding into stories inside stories. If you like books that feel dreamlike but still have the pull of suspense, these are strong places to begin.

Later books widened the range without losing the signature pressure. The Curfew imagines life under authoritarian control, but its deepest bond is between a father and daughter. Silence Once Begun uses interviews, testimony, and silence to build a wrongful conviction story set in Japan. A Cure for Suicide and The Divers' Game move even further into stripped-down speculative worlds where power is arbitrary and kindness can feel radical.

For all their oddness, Ball's books keep circling one plain question, how should we treat other people?

That question becomes especially moving in Census. Ball wrote openly about wanting readers to feel what it is like to know and love a person with Down syndrome, and the novel follows a dying father traveling with his son across a strange country. It is one of his most personal books. How to Set a Fire and Why shows another side of his work, channeling teenage anger through the unforgettable Lucia Stanton, while Autoportrait turns inward in a fragmentary memoir built from memory, grief, jokes, habits, and self-scrutiny.

Along the way, Ball picked up the Paris Review Plimpton Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Award longlist spot for A Cure for Suicide. He was also named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2017. For many years he taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he became known for unusual classes on subjects like lying and dreaming.

He has lived in Chicago since 2007, and in 2025 he joined the University of Virginia as the Sydney Blair Memorial Professor of Creative Writing. He now teaches fiction there and continues to publish novels, memoir, and shorter experimental work. His books can look like fables, puzzles, or parables from a distance, but up close they are very human, and often unexpectedly tender.