How to Set a Fire and Why
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The Violence of Forgetting: The Divers’ Game by Jesse Ball
His is not a language that trivializes violence; it’s a language that exposes it.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #57: Jesse Ball
It can be hard to describe a Jesse Ball novel. They’re willfully strange, dark and puzzling, but the pieces aren’t always designed to fit together. Instead, each of his books, which are always written in the first person, have a…
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In Conversation with Jesse Ball
There are two things in writing: one is to say something with the form of what you’re saying, and the other is to say something with the content of what you are saying. … I think content is not completely…
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How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball
Kaj Tanaka reviews How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball today in Rumpus Books.
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An Interview Goes Both Ways
An unorthodox conversation, or experimental, two-way interview between Jesse Ball and Catherine Lacey at BOMB yields miscommunication, communication, repetition, randomness, push, pull, aphorism, and wisdom. On reading contemporary literature, Ball says: There’s something pernicious about work that is from your specific…
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This Week in Short Fiction
One of this year’s highly anticipated new novels is Jesse Ball’s How to Set a Fire and Why, forthcoming from Pantheon in July, about an intelligent and troubled teenage girl who takes an interest in arson. A standalone excerpt in…