Jess Walter

-----NAMED AMONG THE BEST BOOKS OF 2009-----
NPR's Fresh Air, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Arizona Republic, The Oregonian, Kansas City Star, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Salon.com and New West.

"Lifts off like a rocket ... This vigorous, engaging novel is one of the sharpest satires to come along in years." -- BOSTON GLOBE

"Darkly funny, surprisingly tender ... Walter ... has an abiding faith in the ability of human beings to be decent." -- LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Funny ... engaging ... a refreshing reminder that fiction remains a relevant, vital way to understand ourselves." -- (Portland) OREGONIAN

"Wildly funny ... Jess Walter is a brilliant writer, one of the freshest new voices in American literature. His sentences snap with energy." -- DALLAS MORNING NEWS

"A deliciously antic tale of an American dream gone very sour ... sharp, wide-eyed, soulful ... a scathing indictment of our country's character and the 'ruined systems' we labor under." -- WASHINGTON POST

"The hero of Jess Walter's novel is like a stoned Humbert Humbert ... The funniest way-we-live-now book of the year.” -- TIME

"An apt and timely version of the current Great Recession ... dangerously astute." -- NEW YORK TIMES

“Compulsively readable ... and as beautifully written as anything you'll read this year.”--THE STRANGER (Seattle)

"Extremely funny ... very smart ... cleverly designed and immensely entertaining." -- CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

"Compassionate, witty and drawn from today's heartless world, it's a terrific book." -- ARIZONA REPUBLIC

"Very funny ... Matt Prior is a terrific narrator, and Walter gives him nimble prose." -- MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL

"The novel has warmth, and its protagonist emerges as a bourgeois Everyman of the downturn." -- THE NEW YORKER

"Hilarious and timely ... bitter, funny and accurate ... Jess Walter's buoyant voice is a fresh pleasure." -- NEW WEST

"Hilarious and tragic … Walter is one of the foremost American fiction writers, comparable to novelist Don DeLillo — both writers flay the American psyche through their characters and both brilliantly craft successive novels that are remarkably different from the other in subject and in style." -- NOVA SCOTIA CHRONICLE HERALD

"Cynical yet warm ... a delight." -- ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S MUST-READ FALL BOOKS

"Gasp out loud funny ... Middle-class mayhem is just the best, at least in Walter's hands." -- NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"A comic and gut-wrenching fable for these impecunious times" -- KANSAS CITY STAR

"A laugh-out-loud, desperately painful account of an economy and a marriage in meltdown." -- from Nick Hornby's Recommended Reading List in PEOPLE MAGAZINE

"The first great novel of the Great Recession ... a hilarious spiral of self-destruction." -- LOUISVILLE COURIER-JOURNAL

"(G)enuinely funny ... it's also a wise novel; a keenly observed dissection of the devolution of the American dream." -- EDMONTON JOURNAL

"Conveys, with perfect pitch, the fear, the insecurity and the economic havoc wrought by the recession on America's middle class." -- THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

"When it comes to explaining to me my own too often baffling nation, there's no one writing today whom I trust as completely as Jess Walter. His intelligence and sympathy and great wit inform every page--indeed every sentence--of his terrific new novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets." --Richard Russo, author of 'That Old Cape Magic'

"Jess Walter’s smart and big-hearted take on our bleak national moment is a welcome relief. The Financial Lives of the Poets is a rollicking fiction and an affecting family portrait, as well as a mordantly funny cautionary tale."
--Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land

"Who would think financial disaster could be so funny? But in The Financial Lives of the Poets, Jess Walter makes it so, and in the process shows why he's one of the best American writers working today ... a profound, and profoundly funny, book; this may well be the classic novel of our post-boom era."
--Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters of Che Guevara

"The Financial Lives of the Poets gives the perpetrators of our economic crisis (that is to say, us) a thrashing worthy of Trollope or Swift ... a virtuoso account of our new sub-prime America ... a hopped up, raucous, stunner of a novel with a hero who’s funny enough to make you weep for what we’ve lost."
--Whitney Terrell, author of The King of Kings County

"The talented Walter finds within his appealing if hapless narrator a perfect conduit for a timely story of personal and financial ruin ... a surprisingly heartwarming portrait of a good man trying to find his way back home."
--Booklist

"bitterly funny ... could not be more topical in its depiction of a leveraged to-the-hilt culture run amuck."
--Kirkus Reviews

JANUARY 23 -- SANDPOINT, IDAHO, with Sam Ligon

FEBRUARY 4 -- WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

FEBRUARY 13 -- CANNON BEACH READING SERIES

MARCH 5 -- LITFEST, Kennewick, WA, 7 p.m. with Pete Fromm

MARCH 25 -- APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY

APRIL 17 -- SPOKANE, GET LIT

APRIL 23 -- WHITWORTH COLLEGE, 7 p.m.

APRIL 25 -- LA TIMES BOOK FESTIVAL

JULY 12-18 -- CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

OCTOBER 7 -- POST FALLS, IDAHO, Idaho Library Association Meeting

PRAISE FOR THE ZERO

"'The Zero' could end up as the 'Catch 22' of 9/​11 ... (with) its brilliant ironies, its deadpan truths, its insider smarts and its everyguy hero ... (Walter) elevates 'The Zero' above mere satire to Kafkaesque parable." -- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"Walter is a gifted writer with unusual breadth. And among the already proliferating and formulaic body of film and fiction grappling with Sept. 11, 'The Zero' is a standout." -- THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"Stunning and provocative ... exquisitely written ... 'The Zero' is by turns heartbreaking and deadpan funny." -- THE SEATTLE TIMES

"… a noir page-turner with powerful social commentary ... full of dead-on insights into our culture ... nails our often surreal post-9/​11 world." -- WASHINGTON POST BOOKWORLD

"Mr. Walter (is) a ridiculously talented writer ... The best of 'The Zero' breathes life into the author’s idea of post-9/​11 life as a fever dream for its characters." NEW YORK TIMES

"Walter has created a satire/​tragedy that Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might appreciate … a dark allegory about the attack, the aftermath, and what has happened to America." USA TODAY

PRAISE FOR CITIZEN VINCE

"Utterly inventive ... excruciatingly breathless ... you just have to read it." WASHINGTON POST

"Wonderfully written ... hard to forget." LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Citizen Vince is fast, tough, thoughtful and funny. I loved this novel." NICK HORNBY