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Jess Walter

Biography

Jess Walter

Jess Walter is the author of seven novels, including the bestsellers BEAUTIFUL RUINS and THE FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POET, the National Book Award finalist THE ZERO, and CITIZEN VINCE, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

Jess Walter

Books by Jess Walter

by Jess Walter - Fiction, Short Stories

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 Jess Walter’s collection of stories, 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 21-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.

by Jess Walter - Fiction

The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While 16-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 Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless 19-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.

by Jess Walter - Fiction

In 1962, a young innkeeper in Italy spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman approaching him on a boat. He soon learns that she’s an American actress --- and she’s dying. And the story begins again today, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot, searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

by Jess Walter - Fiction, Short Stories

In this first collection of short stories from bestselling author Jess Walter, the pieces range from comic tales of love to social satire and suspenseful crime fiction. Among them are "We Live in Water," in which a lawyer returns to a corrupt North Idaho town to find the father who disappeared 30 years earlier, and the collection's final story, which transforms slyly from a portrait of Walter's hometown into a moving contemplation of our times.

written by Jess Walter, performed by Edoardo Ballerini - Fiction

The story begins in 1962. On the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies a tall, thin woman approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, an American starlet, and she is dying. And the story begins again today when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot --- searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.