Richard Russo, one of my favorite writers, was asked a while back to name some recent books he’d enjoyed. He rattled off a few titles then ended his list with “anything by Jess Walter.” I can see why. Walter is funny, writes as though it’s an easy thing to do, reveals what we recognize as true human nature, and creates characters who aren’t perfect, but you find yourself pulling for anyway. In other words, he’s a lot like Russo. This particular one may not reach the same heights as Citizen Vince...

3.5 rounded up. This is a novel about a family and in particular a husband and father who loses his job during the mortgage crisis of 2008. Remembering and reading about the struggles of that time not so very long ago reminded me of how difficult times (like now) both financially and emotionally seem to come in waves and that problems never occur in a vacuum but breed others big and small. This might seem a depressing topic but watching the narrator look at and try to find ways of coping (both g...

After a doomed website venture unemployed finance journalist Matt Prior is on the verge of losing his home, his wife(who suspects she is having an affair) and probably his sanity,all while trying to look after his two young boys and a senile father who just wants to watch tv,but then stumbles on a change to become a short term drug dealer with what he thinks is a way to make some easy money,but of course things don't go according to plan.This was a nice easy read and had some great comic and hea...

Heard good things about this book and since it was "if you like that one, you'll like this one" book recommendation from what was my favorite read of last year, Jonathan Tropper's "This Is Where I Leave You," I thought I'd give it a shot. I can see why the books were grouped together as Tropper's Judd Foxman is in a similar mid-life-ish crisis/downward spiral mode as Matt Prior, whose life is in disarray after his dream of a financial poetry website (poetfolio.com!) spectacularly crashes and bur...

I honestly have no idea why people like this book. Why? Will someone tell me why? The whole thing can best be summed up by the fact that, while our protagonist is looking at a pile of lumber in his front yard his son says it looks like Jenga. This not only leads said character to cry because of how Jenga was once his son's favorite game, but also to *compare life to Jenga.* That's roughly the level of depth you're dealing with here. Since I can't understand what's meant to be good, I should at l...

If I were a publisher, I’d fight to publish Jess Walter. He writes funny literary commercial novels with mass appeal, and I’m happy to be part of his adoring public.The Financial Lives of Poets is my fourth Walter book, and my favorite so far: Unemployed business journalist and American Dream-addict Matt Prior’s downward spiral into inept drug dealing is not dark, because he’s so honest about his desperation and idiot attempts to save his and his family’s behinds. I loved everybody in this book,...

Yeahhhh, not a fan. I dunno, it's decently written and decently paced and decently plotted, but it's kind of too much of those things, a little too slick and too pat and too gimmicky. It started out strong, but deflated pretty fast.It's about a middle-class family in the throes of the mortgage crisis, who are about to lose their house. In a desperate last-ditch effort to get financially solvent, Dad (view spoiler)[becomes a small-time drug dealer (hide spoiler)]. The way this comes about is pret...

This is going to take some linguistic acrobatics. I'm going to spend the next 500 or so words trying to convince you that a story about bad choices, despair, near-financial ruin, and a failing marriage is one of the funniest, most charming, and downright best books you'll read in a long, long time. Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets is fantastic — an authentic and timely story, featuring cameos from the mortgage crisis, the slow death of newspapers, and the increasingly intense cultu...

A former financial journalist decides to branch out into a new, innovative field - financial news presented in poetic form! Unfortunately poetfolio.com doesn't take off and leaves him with a mountain of debt. Couple that with his wife's eBay addiction, his weeks of unemployment, and the financial crash of 2008 and he soon finds himself 1 week away from eviction from his dream house. At a loose end one night, he encounters some stoners and begins to think about dealing weed to get out of his imme...

Jess Walter has, in short shrift, become my single favorite contemporary author. I was first introduced to his work through his contribution to the series of short stories in the Amazon Warmer cli-fi collection, where he was absolutely brilliant. This innovative novel has only solidified my fan status.The Financial Lives of the Poets opens with an introduction to Matt, an out-of-work journalist fresh off of a failed business attempt to meld poetry and financial articles in an online format—and i...

Seems to me that one's tolerance for this book is going to be directly proportional to how "winning" one finds the main character. At the 100-page mark, there's very little about him that I find appealing. To the extent that he is credible as a character at all, and not just an authorial gimmick that should have been strangled at birth, he is remarkably irritating. Or maybe it's Jess Walter that is the real irritant. So far the author he most reminds me of is Neal Pollock, which - I hope I don't...

Do you ever read one book, usually a break-out book, from an author and wonder where did he/she come from? What else have they written? That was the case with me with Jess Walter. I read his recent Beautiful Ruins and loved it. So, I picked up The Financial Lives of the Poets (what a risky, terrifically provoking title) and loved it! It hits close to home -- a newspaper writer is laid off, on the brink of financial collapse, and on a late night excursion for over-priced milk for his two young so...

I really loved Citizen Vince, and was slightly less enamored of The Zero. But Walter is up to his old tricks in ...Poets. What a goofball! He had me snorting with runaway laughter...everything is on the skewed side of perfectly possible...sort of like trying to reason with someone who's smoked too much pot. Their mind rotates, quickly at first, in smaller and smaller circles, until they reach some inevitable stupid conclusion, much like the protagonist in this book. Gets his life in a twist and

Warning: The first part of this review consists of my idle musings on a topic that occurred to me while reading this book. If you don’t give a damn about that and just want to get on with the review, skip down.Ever notice how it seems like the same idea start showing up in a variety of tv shows, films, or books at roughly the same time? I’m not talking about the straight-up rip-offs that appear when something like The DaVinci Code hits it big or when trends like vampires or zombies become hot an...

I recall standing in Seattle's Queen Anne Bookstore on a rainy late autumn afternoon in 2009, reading the jacket of this book and ultimately, passing. I wasn't familiar with Jess Walter, although this book seemed to be making quite the splash. I was, however, all too familiar with the effects of the global recession and I just wasn't ready to find it funny. Nope. Not yet. In fact, that very bookstore became one of its casualties a few years later. Fast-forward into a new decade. Jess Walter has

I just fell in love with Jess Walter's "Beautiful Ruins", and I was really happy to see that he's been able to do his magic with this book too. The striking element in Walter's writing (in these 2 books at least) is his sense of humor, and that's where I see some readers not liking it because they just have a different sense of humor (or they just don't have one). I understand humor is a very personal thing. However, while many "funny" books are just shallow, stupid, unfunny, or absurd, or very

With all of those Breaking Bad/Weeds comparisons in Kemper’s most excellent review, I had rather high hopes for this one. And that opening act did little to dissuade my enthusiasm. “Here they are again—the bent boys, baked and buzzed boys, wasted, red-eyed, dry-mouth high boys, coursing narrow bright aisles hunting food as fried as they are, twitchy hands, wadding bills they spill on the counter, so pleased and so proud, as if they’re the very inventors of stoned.” And here he is, Matt, your

Yes, that's right. Five stars. Five.I loved this. I read it in one happy sitting, laughing out loud - literally, out loud - or just marveling at the wonderfulness.The premise is something close to my heart - the financial disaster, or to be more precise, the greed of the American Dream that caused a living nightmare - and combining, intriguingly enough, poetry. Love it!The book's narrator is your classic victim of banking on mortgages and credit only to fall splat when everything goes under, and...

For everyone who put their faith in the American dream, the bubble that would never burst, this book is for them. Matt Prior – the desperate narrator of The Financial Lives of the Poets – is truly everyman…a basically good person who is now scrambling to stay marginally solvent in the wake of the huge financial crash.Matt hasn’t had it so good recently: he left a dying career in journalism (in one of the most scathing and accurate indictments I’ve read about modern-day newspapers) to develop a w...

I have found that Jess Walter is an author many readers are not familiar with - Acquaint yourself with him. He's an excellent writer but he is difficult to categorize by genre. He's written two non-fiction book and five novels - which range from mysteries to satire. With his writing he's able to transport the reader to situations so real that it'll give you chills. For instance in an earlier novel - Land of the Blind - he captures the difficult times of junior high so effectively that my stomach...