Synopses & Reviews
Meet Matt Prior. He's about to lose his job, his wife, his house, maybe his mind. Unless . . .
In the winning and utterly original novels Citizen Vince and The Zero, Jess Walter ("a ridiculously talented writer", New York Times) painted an America all his own: a land of real, flawed, and deeply human characters coping with the anxieties of their times. Now, in his warmest, funniest, and best novel yet, Walter offers a story as real as our own lives: a tale of overstretched accounts, misbegotten schemes, and domestic dreams deferred.
A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea — and his wife's eBay resale business — ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams. One morning Matt wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. Is this really how things were supposed to end up for me, he wonders: staying up all night worried, driving to 7-Eleven in the middle of the night to get milk for his boys, and falling in with two local degenerates after they offer him a hit of high-grade marijuana?
Or, he thinks, could this be the solution to all my problems?
Following Matt in his week-long quest to save his marriage, his sanity, and his dreams, The Financial Lives of the Poets is a hysterical, heartfelt novel about how we can reach the edge of ruin — and how we can begin to make our way back.
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. " Nick Hornby, Parade
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"Cynical yet warm, this novel about a financial reporter (with a failing website written entirely in blank verse) is a delight." Dallas Morning News
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"America's first Great Recession novel." Christian Science Monitor
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"Hilarious and timely...Walter grounds the story with moments of genuine feeling...bitter, funny and accurate...Jess Walter's buoyant voice is a fresh pleasure." The New Yorker
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"A real find....the ultimate something-for-everyone-don't-skip-must-read." Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land and Venus Drive
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"One of the best American writers working today....It's a testament to this author's genius that I could not stop laughing even as he drives home some necessary truths. Walter has written a profound, and profoundly funny, book; this may well be the classic novel of our post-boom era." Whitney Terrell, author of The King of Kings County and The Huntsman
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"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." Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
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"Would be so sad if it weren't so funny, and so funny if it weren't so sad....Compassionate, witty and drawn from today's heartless world, it's a terrific book." Arizona Republic
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"In this cautionary tale of fiscal follies and collapse Walter delivers a comic and gut-wrenching fable for these impecunious times." Kansas City Star
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"Darkly funny, surprisingly tender...witheringly dead-on." Los Angeles Times
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"Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets is gasp out loud funny. It's also sufficiently true to life that you're grateful it's not your life. Middle-class mayhem is just the best, at least in Walter's hands." New York Daily News
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"An extremely funny novel...a very smart meditation on what's gone wrong with both the US economy and those of us who are expected to keep it running...cleverly designed and immensely entertaining." Christian Science Monitor
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"The novel has warmth, and its protagonist emerges as a bourgeois Everyman of the downturn." The New Yorker
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"[A] superb farce." Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
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"National Book Award-finalist Walter does for the nation's bleak financial landscape what he did for 9-11 in The Zero: whip-smart satire with heart." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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"Matt Prior...is an Everyman for our parlous times." Seattle Times
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"Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets is a comic, graceful parable of marriage and money troubles in which a well-meaning family man makes decisions that are seriously stupid — and entertaining and American." Sarah Vowell, author of Assassination Vacation and The Wordy Shipmates
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"A comic masterpiece...packed [with] life and wry truth." Jeffrey Burke, Bloomberg News
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"Confirms Jess Walter as a writer of the first rank....his eye keen for the true values of the human heart. This is 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 and The Huntsman
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"The funniest way-we-live-now book of the year." Time magazine
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"A deliciously antic tale of an American dream gone very sour...part noir gumshoe, part average Joe, [Matt Prior] is a sharp, wide-eyed, soulful observer, with a keen eye for the layers of bureaucracy and doublespeak." Washington Post
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"Jess Walter is a brilliant writer, one of the freshest new voices in American literature." Dallas Morning News
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"America's first Great Recession novel." Spokane Spokesman-Review
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"[Walter is a] deft humorist and catastrophist. . . . dangerously astute." Janet Maslin, New York Times
Synopsis
The Financial Lives of the Poets is a comic and heartfelt novel from National Book Award nominee Jess Walter, author of Citizen Vince and The Zero, about how we get to the edge of ruin--and how we begin to make our way back.
Walter tells the story of Matt Prior, who's losing his job, his wife, his house, and his mind--until, all of a sudden, he discovers a way that he might just possibly be able to save it all . . . and have a pretty damn great time doing it.
The cover of this paperback edition comes in three different colors: green, blue, and orange.
Synopsis
"Darkly funny, surprisingly tender . . . witheringly dead-on." -- Los Angeles Times
Named 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-Dispatch
A 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.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Jess Walter is the author of The Zero (a finalist for the National Book Award), Citizen Vince (a winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel), Land of the Blind, Ruby Ridge, and Over Tumbled Graves (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year). He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.