Inside the Bizarre, Brilliant World of Jesse Ball One of the most exciting experimental writers of our time explores dreams, lies, arson, and other sublime pursuits.

Above: Ball in a Bucktown studio he uses strictly for thinking about his projects Photos: Matthew Avignone

Jesse Ball is trying to show me how to lucid-dream. The 38-year-old writer and I are in a café in Lincoln Park to discuss his novels and poetry. Almost immediately we find ourselves talking instead about the class on dreaming he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“You can begin by looking at a book. When you’re dreaming, you can pick up a book and then put it down and pick it up again, and the title usually changes. Usually the dream can’t keep up.” Here he picks up a magazine that happens to be lying on a nearby table, holds it up, then sets it down again. “You can constantly do this during the day, these escape tests, to know if you’re dreaming. Dreams are an accumulation of habits. What are you but your habits? And these habits continue in dreams. So when you’re awake, you can pick up a book—or you could do this when you are walking or when you go through a doorway—and ask yourself, Is this a dream? You have to get into the habit of it. Eventually, when you’re actually asleep, you’ll pick up a book and ask, Is this a dream? and the answer will be yes. And then you can fly around.”


It’s strange stuff, this notion of training yourself to control your dreams, and it could come straight from one of Ball’s surreal novels, which have made him into one of the most acclaimed experimental writers to come out of Chicago in years. Ball, who was just named a Guggenheim fellow, creates worlds that exist somewhere between the known and the unknown, the real and the absurd. His work has garnered attention from the likes of The Paris Review and the National Endowment for the Arts for its ingenious depictions of well-intentioned characters who must negotiate difficult mazes of tragedy and the unending tangles of unjust social systems.

“Books should have a purpose,” Ball says. “Books should be practical in some sense. Because [in life] you are going to be racked with grief and afflicted by mortal things, horrific things that you can’t even predict. Everything that’s good that’s given to you is going to be taken away, so you have to learn how to behave and how to navigate these things.”

Ball’s work is as spellbinding as it is daring. His 2014 novel, Silence Once Begun, about a Japanese man tricked into confessing a crime he did not commit, is presented as a series of interviews with witnesses. A Cure for Suicide, from 2015, which centers on a nameless man who has lost his memory, is told mostly through dialogue. His new novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, out in July, takes the form of the diary of a troubled teenage girl named Lucia.

“Books should be practical in some sense. Because [in life] you are going to be racked with grief and afflicted by mortal things, horrific things that you can’t even predict.” Photo: Matthew Avignone

“Each of the books is quite unlike the other ones,” says Ball, whose chin and cheeks are dotted with a range of whiskery growth. “There’s a sentiment or feeling I’m trying to get at. The form of the book is the form that allows me to do that.” What connects each of these books is his pursuit of a single act of discovery, the moment when a character realizes the world is much more complicated than he or she thought. Publishers Weekly notes in a starred review for his latest: “Lucia details a philosophy that smartly parallels the novel’s own—namely, that writing literature is, like arson, an act of creation and destruction.”

Ball’s interest in the liminal nature of words began when he was a boy. His father, Robert, handed him Grendel, by John Gardner, a modern retelling of the Old English poem Beowulf, written from the monster’s point of view. Rather than being daunted by the heavy topics of good and evil and the necessity of myths, Ball was fascinated. Having been brought up as an atheist, he learned to question the way the world worked. His father, when asked of his political beliefs, would reply that he was a Peter Kropotkin anarchist, a reference to the 19th-­century Russian scientist who advocated decentralizing governments throughout Europe. “I guess there was also some obscure religious movement in England called the Fifth Monarchists,” Ball says, “who believed the British king was the Antichrist.” His father identified with them too.


Ball grew up in Port Jefferson, New York, on Long Island. His mother, Catherine, was a librarian; his father was an administrator for Medicaid. Before that, his father had been a seminarian, and his mother had trained to be a nun before deciding the religious life wasn’t for her. The two met at a bookstore in Washington, D.C.

As a child, Ball spent a significant amount of time in intensive care units with his older brother, Abram, who was born with Down syndrome and suffered from complications related to it. Books became a refuge. “Sometimes I’d read. There was the humming of machines, his ventilator. He couldn’t really communicate very much, but he could smile, demonstrate emotion.”

When Ball was 12, he began writing poems in secret. He had no interest in showing his work to anybody. “There’s a phase where a writer or any kind of artist has to focus on just doing the work for themselves.” His father died when Ball was 18; his brother, three years later. Ball doesn’t say much about those early losses, but they clearly imbue his writing with an emotional gravity few writers his age carry.

He continued to write for himself at Vassar College and eventually headed to Columbia University for an MFA. There he met poet Richard Howard, who helped him publish his first book of poems, March Book, when he was 24. He published his first novel, Samedi the Deafness, a few years later, in 2007, to promising reviews.