Jesse Ball. (2009). The Way Through Doors. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Jesse Ball. 2009. The Way Through Doors. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Jesse Ball, The Way Through Doors. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009.

Jesse Ball. The Way Through Doors. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009.

OverDrive Product Record

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The Way Through Doors

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1. • value: 21st century
2. • value: Friendship
3. • value: literary fiction
4. • value: Tales
5. • value: romance
6. • value: Humor
7. • value: contemporary fiction
8. • value: Fiction
9. • value: crime
10. • value: philosophy
11. • value: novels
12. • value: love
13. • value: Death
14. • value: satire
15. • value: Comedy
16. • value: mystery
17. • value: Modern
18. • value: magical realism
19. • value: Science Fiction
20. • value: haunting
21. • value: Novella
22. • value: English literature
23. • value: literature
24. • value: fiction books
25. • value: fantasy
26. • value: British Literature
27. • value: funny books
28. • value: humor books
29. • value: humorous books
30. • value: satire fiction
31. • value: magical realism novel
32. • value: magical realism fiction
33. • value: funny gifts
34. • value: magical realism novels
35. • value: Jesse Ball
36. • value: gifts for writers
37. • value: magical realism books
38. • value: realistic fiction books
39. • value: books fiction

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Ball, Jesse
   • bioText: Jesse Ball (1978-) is an American poet and novelist. He is the author of Samedi the Deafness, released last year by Random House and shortlisted for the 2007 Believer Book Award. His first volume, March Book, appeared in 2004, followed by Vera & Linus (2006), and Parables and Lies (2008). His drawings were published in 2006 in Iceland in the volume Og svo kom nottin. He won the Plimpton Prize in 2008 for his novella, The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr. His verse appeared in The Best American Poetry 2006. He is an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
   • name: Jesse Ball

imprint

Vintage

publishDate

2009-02-10T00:00:00-05:00

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title

The Way Through Doors

fullDescription

With his debut novel, Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball emerged as one of our most extraordinary new writers. Now, Ball returns with this haunting tale of love and storytelling, hope and identity.
When Selah Morse sees a young woman get hit by a speeding taxicab, he rushes her to the hospital. The girl has lost her memory; she is delirious and has no identification, so Selah poses as her boyfriend. She is released into his care, but the doctor charges him to keep her awake, and to help her remember her past. Through the long night, he tells her stories, inventing and inventing, trying to get closer to what might be true, and hoping she will recognize herself in one of his tales. Offering up moments of pure insight and unexpected, exuberant humor, The Way Through Doors demonstrates Jesse Ball's great artistry and gift for and narrative.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Sacramento Book Review
   • content: "Perplexing, insightful, and uplifting, and sometimes all of the above at once. Throughout, [The Way Through Doors] remains consistently engaging."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Boldtype
   • content: "An ingenious manifesto of the free imagination, a reminder not only of enchantment's uses, but of how it actually feels. . . . A funhouse of fictions, [The Way Through Doors] is full of sudden doorways, with each room cluttered with the caprices of Selah's imagination; but it is also a fable, with morals for both Mora and the reader. . . . [Ball's] virtuosic display of the art of fiction might also serve as a guide to the art of life."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
   • content: "A literary Russian nesting doll. . . . Ball is arguably one of the more dynamic young American writers to emerge in the last few years."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Time Out New York
   • content: "Clever, digressive fiction in which the plot forks and mutates to yield multiple new and sometimes interconnected story lines. . . . It's easy to be impressed by the tortuous routes Ball's novel follows as it steps away from and back through the original Selah-Mora narrative."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Time Out Chicago
   • content: "Unique. . . . Reminiscent of Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler in the way it calls upon stories outside the main plot to dig at the truth."
6. • premium: False
   • source: The Weekly Dig
   • content: "In the hands of a talented writer, doors can be a felicitous metaphor, but it is singularly when Jesse Ball takes the door by the knob that ingress becomes pure, prurient flirtation. . . . With a Surrealistic touch and Murakami-esque whimsy, Ball distinguishes himself in his storytelling as a master of doors. The reader is never sure whether a story is on its way in, or out...and all the time, the prose is with such light-handed beauty and wit that it could be a novel by Frank O'Hara. . . . A must-read."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Bookforum
   • content: "[An] endlessly permutable plot boiler. . . . [A] marvelous, Escher-inflected labyrinth."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content: "Everything in the pages of this novel may be in doubt, but Jesse Ball's gifts as a writer are real."
9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from October 13, 2008
     The search for a stranger's history leads down a narrative cul-de-sac in Plimpton Prize–winner Ball's accomplished and clever second novel (after Samedi the Deafness
     ). When pamphleteer Selah Morse witnesses a taxi run down a young woman, he takes her to the hospital and, in telling the staff that he is her boyfriend and that her name is Mora Klein, is given custody of her. She is amnesiac, and his orders are to reconstruct her memories through story. The book then begins anew, and the narrative folds in upon itself again and again, launching in new directions and each time leaving the earlier story incomplete. Throughout, Morse searches out Mora Klein's identity, picking up other travelers along the way, among them a Coney Island mind reader; a doting husband who may or may not have made a deal with the devil; a love interest for Morse fascinated by the pamphleteer's opus; and a fiddle-playing dog. Though literal-minded readers may struggle to follow Morse's arc as the stories converge and he slips deeper into layers of story, Ball's skill with language and delight in comic absurdity make this an immensely enjoyable, brain-busting experience.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2009
      Municipal Inspector Selah Morse rushes to the aid of a young woman struck by a taxi. He takes her to a hospital, where he is told her only injury is that she has lost her memory. A doctor tells Selah that he must not let her sleep, and he must help her regain her memory, but neither Selah nor the woman even knows her name. So Selah tells her stories through the long night, in the hope that the stories will trigger her memories. His stories often sound like folktales or fairy tales, and some contain maxims or morals. Some intersect with the Lewis Carrolllike sense that the author creates of a New York City where some people may be ideas instead of corporeal beings. Some of the stories are retold from the perspective of another character. But all deal with facets of being human: love, jealousy, or notions of honor. The Way through Doors is heady stuff. Its charming, lyrical, fanciful, and funny, and it invites a suspension of disbelief that may be a tonic for our parlous times.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

popularity

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With his debut novel, Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball emerged as one of our most extraordinary new writers. Now, Ball returns with this haunting tale of love and storytelling, hope and identity.
When Selah Morse sees a young woman get hit by a speeding taxicab, he rushes her to the hospital. The girl has lost her memory; she is delirious and has no identification, so Selah poses as her boyfriend. She is released into his care, but the doctor charges him to keep her awake, and to help her remember her past. Through the long night, he tells her stories, inventing and inventing, trying to get closer to what might be true, and hoping she will recognize herself in one of his tales. Offering up moments of pure insight and unexpected, exuberant humor, The Way Through Doors demonstrates Jesse Ball's great artistry and gift for and narrative.

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