A glorious addition to the oeuvre. . . . So. Damn. Funny. . . . Prepare for delight.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"One of our finest practitioners of the short story form returns with an ebullient second collection. Fans of Walter’s seminal Beautiful Ruins will fall hard for the swoony title story... Wise, poignant, and generous of spirit, these stories remind us that Walter is a national treasure." — Esquire ("Best Books of Summer 2022")
"Even great short story collections normally contain a miss or two in the lot. But not this one. Every single offering in Jess Walter’s newest collection is a poignant, heart-filled gem. His subjects range from Italian actresses to besotted teachers, surprising one-night stands to overheard diner conversations. He delights equally whether bringing to life a minor moment or an epic love story." — Daily Beast
"Empathetic yet unsentimental [and] intensely affecting fiction...[Walter] manages to render multiple generations of emotionally complex lives in just a handful of pages. . . . The stories in The Angel of Rome are largehearted and wonderfully inventive. They can be savored at the dentist’s office, or anywhere, without an eye on the clock." — Hilma Wolitzer, New York Times Book Review
"Reading Walter’s perceptive collection (after The Cold Millions ) is like sitting next to the guy at a dinner party who has something hilarious to say about everyone and knows all their secrets." — Publishers Weekly
“A transfixing cast of characters navigating fame, performance, identity, aging, and romance.” — Elle
“Twelve sparkling, neatly varied pieces that range from Europe to the small towns of rural Washington State, and from the 1970s to the present. The rambunctious title story shows Walter at his best … Walter also reveals a gift for darker, more surreal humor … (and) compassion, wit, and general charm.” — Booklist
"The beloved “Beautiful Ruins” author is back with a collection of upbeat short stories. The title story recalls his hit novel with its Italian setting, beautiful movie star character and goofy male protagonist. Even in stories about dealing with troubles like cancer, a parent with Alzheimer's, homophobia and climate change, Walter finds humor and warmth." — Newsday
"Walter’s new collection of stories gives us characters as diverse as an actor in recovery, an exchange student in Rome, a teenage girl grappling with the loss of her mother, and a young gay man struggling to connect with his elderly father. Walter is sure to bring his poignant touch to these stories as he did with his previous books, Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions." — Lit Hub
”The Best Short Story Writer in 21st Century America? … I was unprepared to fall headlong in love with this writer … What makes Jess Walter so good? For starters, there’s the way he gets deep into a diverse array of heads and hearts … In the end, it is (his) fully imagined citizenship in our world that is his primary power. Call it a vision, a prowess, or an instinct, but whatever the word, it cannot be taught in grad school. — Arts Fuse
"If it were possible to sum up Jess Walter’s The Angel of Rome and Other Stories in a word, it would be humane. In the 12 wide-ranging, consistently empathetic stories that compose his second collection, he creates a memorable assortment of characters who bump up against life’s inevitable obstacles, large and small, then stumble through or surmount them. . . . The tales in The Angel of Rome aren’t easily categorized, but each one provides a refreshingly honest glimpse into what it means to be alive." — BookPage (Starred Review)
"Walter’s intriguing and witty collection of short fiction stories shines a light on the lives of a diverse range of characters experiencing existential crises while searching for inspiration. Despite the fact that The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories is fictional, it’s unequivocally relatable and insightful, perhaps even encouraging the reader to do a little bit of their own introspective thinking." — Town & Country
"He’s at the very top of his game. . . . The stories Walter’s characters create come from pain and joy and the pasts they can’t forget. The result is a powerful collection, insightful and frequently quite funny, which stuns in all sorts of unexpected ways." — Michael Schaub, Alta
"Reading Jess Walter’s second collection of short stories, one is shepherded through sometimes gritty terrain, but with the constant assurance of finding light and unexpected laughs. He mines gold from the profound perspectives of his unique characters." — Christian Science Monitor
"(Jess Walter's) newest short story collection, The Angel of Rome and Other Stories, is the mark of a profoundly talented writer who can capture the internal lives of a 20-something barista living in Bend, Oregon, an older man glaring at kids from his window in Spokane and an Italian actress reflecting on how she never got her dream role in equally persuasive and poignant ways." — Seattle Times
It’s a tremendous work, a vivid, propulsive, historical novel with a politically explosive backdrop that reverberates through our own.
USA Today (on The Cold Millions)
"Stories that twist and plumb, delivering unexpected laughs while playing with what we think we know … Walter has emerged as one of the country’s most dazzling novelists … so freakishly, fiendishly good, it isn’t fair."
"Walter has made a major career out of the minor character, and his portrait of Rye . . . is generously brought to life with humanity and wit. Walter’s latest novel is more hybrid beast than those earlier books: not quite fiction and not history but a splicing of the two, so that the invented rises to the occasion of the real and the real guides and determines the fate of the invented. . . . Which isn’t to say the book lacks brio or invention; it is full of both."
New York Times Book Review (on The Cold Millions)
A ridiculously talented writer.”
New York Times (on The Zero)
Captivating ... devastating ... Walter is a bighearted man who excels at writing about other bighearted, if broken, men. That generosity of spirit, coupled with Walter's seeming inability to look away from the messy bits, elevates these stories from dirges to symphonies.”
New York Times Book Review
Vibrant. . . . Filled with a gusto that honors the beauty of believing in societal change and simultaneously recognizes the cruel limits of the possible. . . . The Cold Millions is reminiscent of the work of John dos Passos and EL. Doctorow. . . . A spirited and expansive novel.
Wall Street Journal (on The Cold Millions)
Jess Walter is as talented a natural storyteller as is working in American fiction these days … These stories have both zip and heart, muscle and soul.”
Jess Walter is a superb storyteller. His plot rolls on at a steady pace. His ear for dialogue, whatever the character, is acute. He knows when to amp up the prose with a telling metaphor. . . . As polished and hard as a diamond, The Cold Millions reminds us of America’s tempestuous past and suggests that all this is anything but past.
Boston Globe (on The Cold Millions)
The Cold Millions is a literary unicorn: a book about socio-economic disparity that’s also a page-turner, a postmodern experiment that reads like a potboiler, and a beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history. It’s funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes. Jess Walter is a national treasure.
Jess Walter is as talented a natural storyteller as is working in American fiction these days … These stories have both zip and heart, muscle and soul.”
A prodigiously gifted writer. His sentences nearly sing.”
Los Angeles Review of Books (on Beautiful Ruins)
It’s a tremendous work, a vivid, propulsive, historical novel with a politically explosive backdrop that reverberates through our own.
USA Today on The Cold Millions
Jess Walter is a superb storyteller. His plot rolls on at a steady pace. His ear for dialogue, whatever the character, is acute. He knows when to amp up the prose with a telling metaphor. . . . As polished and hard as a diamond, The Cold Millions reminds us of America’s tempestuous past and suggests that all this is anything but past.
Boston Globe on The Cold Millions
"Walter has made a major career out of the minor character, and his portrait of Rye . . . is generously brought to life with humanity and wit. Walter’s latest novel is more hybrid beast than those earlier books: not quite fiction and not history but a splicing of the two, so that the invented rises to the occasion of the real and the real guides and determines the fate of the invented. . . . Which isn’t to say the book lacks brio or invention; it is full of both."
New York Times Book Review on The Cold Millions
Vibrant. . . . Filled with a gusto that honors the beauty of believing in societal change and simultaneously recognizes the cruel limits of the possible. . . . The Cold Millions is reminiscent of the work of John dos Passos and EL. Doctorow. . . . A spirited and expansive novel.
Wall Street Journal on The Cold Millions
01/01/2022
A collector of honors, with Stegner, Rona Jaffe, and three Pushcart Prizes among them, Conklin offers a Rainbow Rainbow of short stories about queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans characters like the fifth grader who explores gender identity by dressing as an ox—instead of a matriarch—for a school reenactment of the Oregon Trail. After closing out her twice Booker-honored "Wolf Hall" trilogy, Mantel limns the transformative aspects of childhood in the loosely autobiographical stories of Learning To Talk . Author of the New York Times best-selling Three Women and the deliciously contentious debut novel Animal , a personal favorite, Taddeo offers stories (two Pushcart Prize-winning) grounded in the dating service Ghost Lover , a forwarding system for text messages (75,000-copy first printing). In The Angel of Rome , Beautiful Ruins author Walter highlights crucial moments in the lives of his characters, from a teenage girl aspiring to be like her missing mother to a son who must come out repeatedly to a father facing dementia.
This audiobook marks the convergence of two Golden Voice narrators with one of the country’s finest fiction writers. Edoardo Ballerini and Julia Whelan narrate these empathic, witty, and finely wrought short stories. Whelan sparkles with her persuasive style, smooth tone, and practiced cadence. Her honey-coated voice is especially memorable in the ironic mode of “Mr. Voice” and “Famous Actor.” Ballerini contributed his own life history to the title story and performs with his characteristic empathy and signature evocative tone. He acts all his stories with restraint and veracity. Author Jess Walter ennobles his characters, giving them dignity in difficult circumstances and creating consequential experiences. Often set in the less glamorous parts of the country like Spokane and Boise, his writing truly makes the ordinary extraordinary. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2022 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
This audiobook marks the convergence of two Golden Voice narrators with one of the country’s finest fiction writers. Edoardo Ballerini and Julia Whelan narrate these empathic, witty, and finely wrought short stories. Whelan sparkles with her persuasive style, smooth tone, and practiced cadence. Her honey-coated voice is especially memorable in the ironic mode of “Mr. Voice” and “Famous Actor.” Ballerini contributed his own life history to the title story and performs with his characteristic empathy and signature evocative tone. He acts all his stories with restraint and veracity. Author Jess Walter ennobles his characters, giving them dignity in difficult circumstances and creating consequential experiences. Often set in the less glamorous parts of the country like Spokane and Boise, his writing truly makes the ordinary extraordinary. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2022 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2022-03-30
Since Beautiful Ruins , his 2012 blockbuster, Walter has won a legion of readers who have been through the backlist and impatiently gobbled down his two follow-ups—a story collection, We Live in Water (2013), and the excellent historical novel Cold Millions (2020). This second collection of shorts is a glorious addition to the oeuvre, with a much brighter mood than its gloomy predecessor. The title story, which began its life as an Audible original, is a mini Beautiful Ruins , including an Italian setting, beautiful movie-star character, and heartbreakingly adorable but benighted male protagonist, here a blue-collar boy from Nebraska whose year abroad involves church-sponsored Latin lessons at a “papal community college” in a Roman industrial building. This. Story. Is. So. Damn. Funny. And almost ridiculously heartwarming. But the same can be said of many of the others, no matter how apparently depressing their topic. For example, the story about a father who must be institutionalized, “Town & Country,” opens with the fact that “Dad literally could not remember to not screw the sixty-year-old lady across the street,” and creates for the man in question an outlaw assisted living center in a seedy, one-story motel in northern Idaho where the meatloaf is still $2 and all the drinks are doubles. The climate change story, “The Way the World Ends,” brings two very depressed Ph.D. students to Mississippi State University to vie for a position in the geosciences department, then throws them together with a three-weeks-out-of-the-closet, very lonely college student named Jeremiah who's trying to decide whether it's worth risking life and limb to march in his first Gay Pride parade. What one of the “climate zealots” says to defend his newfound love of country music resonates through the collection: “Life is hard, the songs seemed to say, but at least it's funny, and it rhymes.”
Not sure why the author is in such a good mood, but it's contagious. Prepare for delight.
