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Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

THE DIVERS' GAME

Jesse Ball

From the inimitable mind of award-winning author Jesse Ball, a novel about an unsettlingly familiar society that has renounced the concept of equality—and the devastating consequences of unmitigated power

The old-fashioned struggle for fairness has finally been abandoned. It was a misguided endeavor. The world is divided into two groups, pats and quads. The pats may kill the quads as they like, and do. The quads have no recourse but to continue with their lives.

The Divers' Game is a thinly veiled description of our society, an extreme case that demonstrates a truth: we must change or our world will collapse.

What is the effect of constant fear on a life, or on a culture? The Divers' Game explores the consequences of violence through two festivals, and through the dramatic and excruciating examination of a woman's final moments.

Brilliantly constructed and achingly tender, The Divers' Game shatters the notion of common decency as the binding agent between individuals, forcing us to consider whether compassion is intrinsic to the human experience. With his signature empathy and ingenuity, Jesse Ball's latest work solidifies his reputation as one of contemporary fiction's most mesmerizing talents.

Jesse Ball is the author of fourteen books.?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 2018 Gordon Burn Prize, the 2008?Paris Review?Plimpton Prize, was longlisted for the National Book Award and is a 2017 Granta Best Young American Novelist. Ball has also been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.??
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Published 2019-09-01 by Ecco Press

Comments

NL: Querido; ANZ: Text; UK: Granta; Turkey: Everest;

“Ball richly imagines a society where empathy is eroded at every level—a condemnation of the by-design inequalities of wealth, justice, freedom and opportunity that underpin western societies...Chilling.”

“Jesse Ball levels a steely gaze at the very concept of humanity in this three-part novel that introduces the lower-class ‘quads' and the rich ‘pats,' who treat those below them with impunity. When a group of pats conceals the grisly fate of a young quad girl behind an elaborate festival, you may start to wonder just how different this dystopian world is from our own.”

"The Divers' Game is as much a critique of the past as the present. It works as a fable not only about the treatment of migrants but also about antisemitism, and about slavery and its continuing consequences. It interrogates the stories we persist in telling about what it is to be a person, and how often they contain the lie of superiority asserted as nature. Ball fictionalises this culture of dominance, and captures how it metastasises into institutions of justice and education, as well as into the gestures and choices of everyday life. By exposing the workings of supremacy in the human imagination, his novel makes a contribution towards preventing it from being our permanent future." Read more...

“It's hard to read a book like The Divers' Game—in which an unnamed nation receives an influx of refugees and abandons the notion of human fellow feeling—and not immediately think of the present moment, with its constant news of border atrocities...[an] interlocking puzzle box of a novel, artful and often inscrutable.”

“A book that contemplates, with the gravity and grace it deserves, a world beyond the point of no return... Stunning...The book's final section, in which a woman confronts the violence within herself, is one of the more beautiful things I've ever read.”

“Ball, a writer of exceptional and pensive imagination, adds another trenchant fable to his distinctively disquieting oeuvre...One hears the beat of Animal Farm...Writing with blood-freezing sparseness, Ball illuminates this calamitously immoral place...Distressingly mirrors aspects of our own [world].”

The Chicago Tribune, “Fall literary preview” The Washington Post, “10 Books to Read in September” Paris Review Online, “Staff Pick” Press Herald, “The 10 Books to Read in September” Vulture, “37 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2019” Publishers Weekly, “Buzz Book 2019: Spring/Summer” Nylon, “34 Books to Read This Fall” Pacific Standard, “Twenty-Five Must-Read Books for Fall of 2019” SF Gate, “The 10 Books to Read in September” Brainerd Dispatch, “The 10 Books to Read in September”

“Ball's experimental, high-concept novels are both quickly plotted and difficult to shake after reading, full as they are of disturbing imagery and philosophical quandaries that taunt you for days. His latest is an intensely political book set in a society replete with xenophobic violence—one unsettlingly like our own.” (37 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2019)

“The elusive and ever evolving Ball returns with a radical new novel about a divisive future that takes inequality to grotesque extremes...A dystopian novel in the vein of The Handmaid's Tale, viewed through the children who suffer from our mistakes.”

“Mesmerizing...eerie and suffused with symbolic weight.”