Bøker av Jess Walter

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes?for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous?as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places.We all live like we're famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don't want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during ?the year of my reinvention? finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams.Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection of short fiction offers a dazzling range of voices, backdrops, and situations. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch, once again ?solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds? (Esquire).

In this dazzling collection of stories, a son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place that will care for the old man. An elderly couple confronts the note-taking fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the beautifully romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during "the year of my reinvention" finds himself face-to-face with the gorgeous Italian actress of his adolescent dreams. Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection takes the reader to Italy and Idaho, Washington and Mississippi. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch.

"Darkly funny, surprisingly tender . . . witheringly dead-on." -- Los Angeles TimesNamed one of the year's best novels by: Time - Salon.com - Los Angeles Times - NPR/Fresh Air - New West - Kansas City Star - St. Louis Post-DispatchA comic and heartfelt novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and Cold Millions about how we get to the edge of ruin--and how we begin to make our way back.What happens when small-time reporter Matthew Prior quits his job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse?Before long, he wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. . . . Until, one night on a desperate two a.m. run to 7-Eleven, he falls in with some local stoners, and they end up hatching the biggest--and most misbegotten--plan yet.

While working the weekend night shift, Caroline Mabry, a weary Spokane police detective, encounters a seemingly unstable but charming derelict who tells her, "I'd like to confess." But he insists on writing out his statement in longhand. In the forty-eight hours that follow, the stranger confesses to not just a crime but an entire life?spinning a wry and haunting tale of youth and adulthood, of obsession and revenge, and of two men's intertwined lives.Fiendishly clever and darkly funny, Land of the Blind speaks to the bonds and compromises we make as children?and to the fatal errors we can make at any time.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year"Riveting. . . . Without ever taking the easy way out, the book explores the battle of good vs. evil on very human terms." --Washington Post Book WorldDark in mood and rich in character, Over Tumbled Graves by #1 New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter is that rare thriller that manages to be at once viscerally gripping and deeply provocativeDuring a routine drug bust, on a narrow bridge over white-water falls in the center of town, Spokane detective Caroline Mabry finds herself face-to-face with a brutal murderer. Within hours, the body of a young prostitute is found on the riverbank nearby. What follows confronts our fascination with pathology and murder and stares it down, as Caroline and her cynical partner, Alan Dupree--thrown headlong into the search for a serial murderer who communicates by killing women--uncover some hard truths about their profession . . . and each other.Rich with the darkly muted colors of the Pacific Northwest skies, Over Tumbled Graves established Jess Walter as a novelist of extraordinary emotional depth and dimension.

From the highly acclaimed new crime novelist: a story of witness protection, petty thievery, local politics, and murder--set against the turbulent backdrop of the 1980 presidential electionIt's the fall of 1980, the last week before the presidential election that pits the downtrodden Jimmy Carter against the suspiciously sunny Ronald Reagan. In a seedy suburban house in Spokane, a small-time crook formerly from New York, Vince Camden, pockets his weekly allotment of stolen credit cards and heads off to his witness-protection job at a donut shop. A the shop he takes a shine to a regular named Kelly, who works for a local politician. Somehow he finds himself and the politician in a parking lot at three in the morning, giving the slip to a couple of menacing thugs. And then he crosses the path of a young detective--and discovers his credit-scam partner, lying dead in his passport-photo office with a Cheerio-size bullet-hole in his head. No one writing crime novels today tells a story or sketches a character with more freshness or elan than Jess Walter. Citizen Vince is his funniest and grittiest book yet.

A collection of the year's best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by #1 New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha. New York Times bestselling author and ?superb storyteller? (Boston Globe), Jess Walter flexes his genre chops and selects twenty short stories that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes--for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous--as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places.We all live like we're famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don't want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during the year of my reinvention finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams.Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection of short fiction offers a dazzling range of voices, backdrops, and situations. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch, once again solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds (Esquire).

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Beautiful Ruins delivers another literary miracle (NPR)a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early twentieth century.The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.Dubious of Gigs idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war?An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, it is a tour de force from a writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors (Boston Globe).

First published in hardcover: New York: Harper, 2009.

National Book Award FinalistThe breakout novel from a writer of extraordinary talent: In the wake of a devastating terrorist attack, one man struggles to make sense of his world, even as the world tries to make use of him Brian Remy has no idea how he got here. Its been only five days since terrorists attacked his city, and Remy is experiencing gaps in his lifeas if he were a stone being skipping across water. He has a self-inflicted gunshot wound that he doesnt remember inflicting. His son wears a black armband and refuses to acknowledge that Remy is still alive. He seems to be going blind. He has a beautiful new girlfriend whose name he doesnt know. And his old partner in the police department, who may well be the only person crazier than Remy, has just gotten his picture on a box of First Responder cereal. And these are the good things in Brian Remys life. While smoke still hangs over the city, Remy is recruited by a mysterious government agency that is assigned to gather all of the paper that was scattered in the attacks. As he slowly begins to realize that hes working for a shadowy intelligence operation, Remy stumbles across a dangerous plot, and with the world threatening to boil over in violence and betrayal, he realizes that hes got to track down the most elusive target of them allhimself. And the only way to do that is to return to that place where everything started falling apart. In the tradition of Catch-22, The Manchurian Candidate, and the novels of Ian McEwan, comes this extraordinary story of searing humor and sublime horror, of blindness, bewilderment, and that achingly familiar feeling that the world has suddenly stopped making sense.

From the author of the bestselling Beautiful Ruins comes The Financial Lives of Poets - a brilliantly funny novel about a man who, in an attempt to save himself, may destroy everything he loves.Meet Matt Prior. He's about to lose his job, his house, his wife, and maybe his sanity too.Financial journalist Matt quit his job to set up a website which couldn't fail. Only now he's woken up to the biggest crisis since the Great Crash, and it has. He's got six days to save his house. It's hard to focus when your wife's having an online affair with her childhood sweetheart, but there are children to think about . . . So when he gets hold of some high-grade dope and finds he can sell a piece on at a profit, he begins to think this might be his salvation.A fabulously funny, heartfelt novel about how we can skate close to the edge of ruin - and pull back.'A beautifully laid-back exultation of the human connections that make life worth living' Metro'Ecstatically funny and unusually big-hearted' Financial Times 'It made me laugh more than any other book I've read this year' Nick Hornby

From Jess Walter, the bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, comes We Live in Water - a darkly funny, utterly compelling collection of stories about the American family.We Live in Water brings to vivid life a world of lost fathers and redemptive con men, of personal struggles and diminished dreams, a world marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made Jess Walter one of America's most talked-about writers. In 'Thief', a blue-collar worker turns unlikely detective to find out which of his kids is stealing from the family vacation fund. In 'We Live in Water', a lawyer returns to a corrupt North Idaho town to find the father who disappeared thirty years earlier. In 'Anything Helps', a homeless man has to 'go to cardboard' to raise enough money to buy his son the new Harry Potter book. In 'Virgo', a local newspaper editor tries to get back at his superstitious ex-girlfriend by screwing with her horoscope. The final story transforms slyly from a portrait of Walter's hometown into a moving contemplation of our times.'A ridiculously talented writer' The New York Times'One of my favourite young American writers' Nick Hornby'Darkly funny, sneakily sad, these stories are very, very good' Publisher's Weekly'A witty and sobering snapshot of recession-era America' Kirkus

The No. 1 New York Times BestsellerJess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous, glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy and a modern Hollywood studio.The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before.Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach.'Magic...A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart' New York Times'A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor' Booklist'Hilarious and compelling' Esquire