The Financial Lives of the Poets Audiobook

Quotes

• “Walter is one of my favorite young American writers…Made me laugh more than any other book published this year.”

  — Nick Hornby 

• “Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets is a comic, graceful parable of marriage and money troubles in which a well-meaning family man makes decisions that are seriously stupid—and entertaining and American.”

  — Sarah Vowell, author of Assassination Vacation and The Wordy Shipmates

• “When it comes to explaining to me my own too often baffling nation, there’s no one writing today whom I trust as completely as Jess Walter. His intelligence and sympathy and great wit inform every page—indeed every sentence—of his terrific new novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets.”

  — Richard Russo, author of That Old Cape Magic and Empire Falls

• “[Walter is a] deft humorist and catastrophist…dangerously astute.”

  — New York Times

• “A deliciously antic tale of an American dream gone very sour…part noir gumshoe, part average Joe, [Matt Prior] is a sharp, wide-eyed, soulful observer, with a keen eye for the layers of bureaucracy and doublespeak.”

  — Washington Post

• “Darkly funny, surprisingly tender…witheringly dead-on.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “National Book Award finalist Walter does for the nation’s bleak financial landscape what he did for 9-11 in The Zero whip-smart satire with heart.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “The novel has warmth, and its protagonist emerges as a bourgeois Everyman of the downturn.”

  — New Yorker

• “An extremely funny novel…a very smart meditation on what’s gone wrong with both the US economy and those of us who are expected to keep it running…cleverly designed and immensely entertaining.”

  — Christian Science Monitor

• “Jess Walter’s smart and big-hearted take on our bleak national moment is a welcome relief. The Financial Lives of the Poets is a rollicking fiction and an affecting family portrait, as well as a mordantly funny cautionary tale.”

  — Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land and Venus Drive

• “One of the best American writers working today…It’s a testament to this author’s genius that I could not stop laughing even as he drives home some necessary truths. Walter has written a profound, and profoundly funny, book; this may well be the classic novel of our post-boom era.”

  — Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

• “The funniest way-we-live-now book of the year.”

  — Time

• “Cynical yet warm, this novel about a financial reporter (with a failing website written entirely in blank verse) is a delight.”

  — Entertainment Weekly

• “Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets is gasp out loud funny. It’s also sufficiently true to life that you’re grateful it’s not your life. Middle-class mayhem is just the best, at least in Walter’s hands.”

  — New York Daily News

• “Jess Walter is a brilliant writer, one of the freshest new voices in American literature.”

  — Dallas Morning News

• “Confirms Jess Walter as a writer of the first rank…his eye keen for the true values of the human heart. This is a hopped-up, raucous stunner of a novel with a hero who’s funny enough to make you weep for what we’ve lost.”

  — Whitney Terrell, author of The King of Kings County and The Huntsman

• “Would be so sad if it weren’t so funny, and so funny if it weren’t so sad…Compassionate, witty and drawn from today’s heartless world, it’s a terrific book.”

  — Arizona Republic

• “Matt Prior…is an Everyman for our parlous times.”

  — Seattle Times

• “A refreshing reminder that fiction remains a relevant, vital way to understand ourselves.”

  — Oregonian (Portland, OR)

• “In this cautionary tale of fiscal follies and collapse Walter delivers a comic and gut-wrenching fable for these impecunious times.”

  — Kansas City Star

• “America’s first Great Recession novel.”

  — Spokane Spokesman-Review