The Lesson
A Vintage Short
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.
$0.99
November 3, 2015
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.
How to Set a Fire and Why
Jesse Ball
A Cure for Suicide
Jesse Ball
The Lesson
Jesse Ball
Silence Once Begun
Jesse Ball
The Curfew
Jesse Ball
The Way Through Doors
Jesse Ball
Samedi the Deafness
Jesse Ball
Young Goodman Brown
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Phantom Pond
Juneau Black
Ghosts and Speculation
Kevin Brockmeier
The Wedding, the Winery, and Will
Taylor Hahn
A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion
Raphael Bob-Waksberg
Bog Girl
Karen Russell
The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing
Laurie Colwin
Catch a Falling Heart
J. California Cooper
Triage
Richard Russo
Evergreen Chase
Juneau Black
Goldfish
Raymond Chandler
The Bearded Lady
Ross Macdonald
Dead Man
James M. Cain
Still Here, Still There
Richard Bausch
Kashtanka
Anton Chekhov
Island
Alistair MacLeod
Homesickness
Colin Barrett
Coexistence
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Other Worlds
André Alexis
Dance of the Happy Shades
Alice Munro
Death by a Thousand Cuts
Shashi Bhat
Normal Rules Don't Apply
Kate Atkinson
Last Woman
Carleigh Baker
Old Babes in the Wood
Margaret Atwood
The Goodbye Cat
Hiro Arikawa, Translated by Philip Gabriel
Uncertain Kin
Janice Lynn Mather
Sans Souci
Dionne Brand
Games and Rituals
Katherine Heiny