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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.

Praise for The Financial Lives of the Poets…

“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

“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.”
-New West

“Darkly funny, surprisingly tender . . . witheringly dead-on.”
-Los Angeles Times

“Cynical yet warm, this novel about a financial reporter (with a failing website written entirely in blank verse) is a delight.”
-The Must List, Entertainment Weekly

“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

“The novel has warmth, and its protagonist emerges as a bourgeois Everyman of the downturn.”
-The New Yorker

“[A] superb farce.”
-Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

“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)

“Matt Prior . . . is an Everyman for our parlous times.”
-Seattle Times

“In this cautionary tale of fiscal follies and collapse Walter delivers a comic and gut-wrenching fable for these impecunious times.”
-Kansas City Star

“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.”
-Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

“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

“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 and Empire Falls

“Walter is one of my favorite young American writers. . . . [Financial Lives] made me laugh more than any other book published this year.”
-Nick Hornby, Parade

“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

“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 and Venus Drive

“A refreshing reminder that fiction remains a relevant, vital way to understand ourselves.”
-The Oregonian (Portland)

“A real find….the ultimate something-for-everyone-don’t-skip-must-read.”
-Sara Nelson, The Daily Beast

“[Walter is a] deft humorist and catastrophist. . . . dangerously astute.”
-Janet Maslin, New York Times

“A comic masterpiece… packed [with] life and wry truth.”
-Jeffrey Burke, Bloomberg News

“America’s first Great Recession novel.”
-Spokane Spokesman-Review

“Jess Walter is a brilliant writer, one of the freshest new voices in American literature.”
-Dallas Morning News

“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

“The funniest way-we-live-now book of the year.”
-Time magazine

“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