Bøger af Jesse Ball

Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos in this provocative new novel from one of America’s most brilliant and distinctive writersIn a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant’s lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.The case to which Abel is assigned is revealed in the novel’s shocking second act. We receive a record of a boy's broken and constrained life, a tale that reveals an illicit and passionate psycho-sexual relationship, its end as tragic as the circumstances of its conception.Artful in its suspense, and sharp in its evocation of a byzantine and cruel bureaucracy, The Repeat Room is an exciting and pointed critique of the nature of knowledge and judgment, and a vivid framing of Ball's absurd and nihilistic philosophy of love.

Sleep, Death's Brother is an instruction manual on dreaming for children or incarcerated persons, teaching such individuals to lucid dream and thus use their dreams to somewhat escape their situations. While it is often the case that dream life is passively experienced, acclaimed novelist Jesse Ball (born 1978) reminds us that dreaming life is also a place where a sense of agency can grow. Even in the midst of physical or emotional environments that do not support such development in waking life, dreams are a place where one can take control. Ball calls for bravery in the exploration of this practice, and provides the dreamer with useful habits and techniques. Full of affirmation and wisdom, Sleep, Death's Brother is a guidebook "for all oneironauts young and old."

William and Molly lead a life of small pleasures, riddles at the kitchen table, and games of string and orange peels. All around them a city rages with war. When the uprising began, William's wife was taken, leaving him alone with their young daughter. They keep their heads down and try to remain unnoticed as police patrol the streets, enforcing a curfew and arresting citizens. But when an old friend seeks William out, claiming to know what happened to his wife, William must risk everything. He ventures out after dark, and young Molly is left to play, reconstructing his dangerous voyage, his past, and their future. An astounding portrait of fierce love within a world of random violence, The Curfew is a mesmerizing feat of literary imagination.

A text for those curious about education as a context for creativity and collaboration, and for teachers who want to reconsider hierarchy in their classrooms, Jesse Ball's Notes on My Dunce Cap includes advisory material regarding the creation of syllabi and the manner in which groups may evaluate the work of an individual without harm. Ball is renowned for the unique courses he teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, which are compiled in this volume along with extended notes on pedagogy. His meditations consider pedagogy in terms that are at once usefully broad and insightfully profound: "When it is possible for any of us to simply go and sit somewhere in the grass, and when it is such a delightful thing to do, to go and sit in the grass, whether by oneself or with others, then it is important to remember that anytime we think about teaching, or indeed, about any other activity--that we do it instead of sitting somewhere in the grass. We are passing up on the joy of solitude, and all its virtues and pleasures. Therefore, it is crucial that what happens when we teach be of the same value as time spent alone. And that is true both for ourselves and for those we teach." Jesse Ball (born 1978) is the author of five novels, including The Curfew, Silence Once Begun and A Cure for Suicide, which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award, as well as several collections of poetry, including March Book. His work has appeared in numerous publications including The New Republic, The Paris Review, Oberon, Circumference and Guernica Magazine.

From the inimitable mind of award-winning author Jesse Ball, a novel about an unsettlingly familiar society that has renounced the concept of equalityand the devastating consequences of unmitigated powerThe old-fashioned struggle for fairness has finally been abandoned. It was a misguided endeavor. The world is divided into two groups, pats and quads. The pats may kill the quads as they like, and do. The quads have no recourse but to continue with their lives. The Divers Game is a thinly veiled description of our society, an extreme case that demonstrates a truth: we must change or our world will collapse. What is the effect of constant fear on a life, or on a culture? The Divers Game explores the consequences of violence through two festivals, and through the dramatic and excruciating examination of a womans final moments.Brilliantly constructed and achingly tender,The Divers Game shatters the notion of common decency as the binding agent between individuals, forcing us to consider whether compassion is intrinsic to the human experience. With his signature empathy and ingenuity, Jesse Balls latest work solidifies his reputation as one of contemporary fictions most mesmerizing talents.

This second volume of poetry by experimental writer Jesse Ball is a philosophical recasting of myth and legend. Employing an eerie narrative simplicity, these always unpredictable poems are cautionary tales of the oppressiveness of monolithic culture on the development of artistic, philosophical, and political leadership. Alternating from the personal to the public, Ball attains a wide enough vantage to observe the cowardliness of historians in their refusal to ascribe causality. Unearthing parables from the compost heap of oral tradition, folklore, literature, and popular culture, this book projects shadows of figures we think we recognize: Helen Keller, Pompeii, Ellis Island, Houdini, Lazarus, the Pied Piper, Punch and Judy, Hawthorne, Shirley Jackson, and more. Comprised of three separate volumes, The Village on Horseback creates an entirely original world of interrelated characters, with a mix of references, allusions, evocationsthe result being a sort of Brueghel-esque feeland yet theres also a self-conscious acknowledgment of modernity as well as a questioning of the authority of the author in determining meaning. At times evoking Gorey, Chaucer, and the tale of Robin Hood, these fables, ghost stories, and riddles of human nature dissect the individuals interaction with culture, particularly commenting on the ascribing of meaning by communal groups resulting in truth-making, and the limitations of our leaders (artists, philosophers, politicians) in their ability to break us out of communal indoctrination.