Loring is a widow and chess master who makes her living giving chess lessons; her newest student, who might be a prodigy, bears a striking resemblance to her dead spouse. Has her chess champion husband found a final move beyond the grave?
A chess fable from the wildly inventive, immensely talented author of A Cure for Suicide and Silence Once Begun, “The Lesson” is a surprising, poignant, macabre tale of games, children, and the unknowability of the beyond. Channeling the chess masterpieces of Nabokov and Stefan Zweig, Jesse Ball’s newest is a fabulous and entertaining novella that astonishes from first move to last.
An eBook short.
Praise for Silence Once Begun
"Beguiling. . . . Ball enjoys borrowing some of the conventions of crime writing but in order to use them rather than to be used by them. . . . Appealingly funny." --James Wood, The New Yorker
"Rashomon-like. . . . A graceful and multifaceted fable on the nature of truth and identity." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Absorbing, finely wrought. . . . Causes a reader to go carefully, not wanting to miss a word." --Helen Oyeyemi, The New York Times Book Review
"As in Kafka's The Trial, the justice of Silence Once Begun is both tragic and absurd. . . . Genuinely surprising. . . . An accomplishment." --Los Angeles Times
JESSE BALL (1978– ). Born in New York. The author of fourteen books, most recently the novel How to Set a Fire and Why. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Loring is a widow and chess master who makes her living giving chess lessons; her newest student, who might be a prodigy, bears a striking resemblance to her dead spouse. Has her chess champion husband found a final move beyond the grave?
A chess fable from the wildly inventive, immensely talented author of A Cure for Suicide and Silence Once Begun, “The Lesson” is a surprising, poignant, macabre tale of games, children, and the unknowability of the beyond. Channeling the chess masterpieces of Nabokov and Stefan Zweig, Jesse Ball’s newest is a fabulous and entertaining novella that astonishes from first move to last.
An eBook short.
Reviews
Praise for Silence Once Begun
"Beguiling. . . . Ball enjoys borrowing some of the conventions of crime writing but in order to use them rather than to be used by them. . . . Appealingly funny." --James Wood, The New Yorker
"Rashomon-like. . . . A graceful and multifaceted fable on the nature of truth and identity." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Absorbing, finely wrought. . . . Causes a reader to go carefully, not wanting to miss a word." --Helen Oyeyemi, The New York Times Book Review
"As in Kafka's The Trial, the justice of Silence Once Begun is both tragic and absurd. . . . Genuinely surprising. . . . An accomplishment." --Los Angeles Times
JESSE BALL (1978– ). Born in New York. The author of fourteen books, most recently the novel How to Set a Fire and Why. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
