Louis B. Jones is the author of five novels, Ordinary Money (Viking/Penguin), Particles and Luck (Pantheon/Vintage), and California’s Over (Pantheon/Vintage), all three named as New York Times Notable Books of their respective years; and Radiance (Counterpoint) and Innocence (Counterpoint). A Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and a recipient of an NEA Individual Artist Grant, he has published stories and essays in ZYZZYVA, Santa Monica Review, and The Threepenny Review. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis and Wichita State University; and has for many years helped run the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley, California.
NY Times:
“Mr. Jones not only writes originally, he thinks originally as well. One can’t help looking forward to whatever he does next.”
LA Times:
“Jones is one of our most subtle and least classifiable writers…He is interested in courage, openness to life and the refugee course that awaits anyone afflicted with such a pair of virtues…Jones’s people are so human and written with so original a cunning that they are virtually worlds in themselves.”
Newsweek:
“Louis B Jones is a skillful satirist who sees all, knows all, but is never cruel.”
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Sunday NY Times:
“Ordinary Money is the product of an opulent imagination.”
Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post:
“Unusual charm and intelligence…Funny, irreverent, imaginative and refreshingly unpretentious.”
Walter Kirn, Sunday NY Times:
“Jones is a brilliant curator of American junk…It’s the flea market, not the museum, that moves the heart.”
The Book Report:
“Louis B. Jones’s beautifully wicked and clueless characters are so real on the page that one can only assume the author has lived several lives in order to capture them.”
Chicago Tribune:
“Indescribable weirdness.”
Carolyn See, Sunday NY Times:
“How good of Louis B. Jones to remind us what a beautiful land — a terra linda — we live in, and to remind us of the beautiful universe beyond.”
Richard Eder, LA Times:
“Smart, funny, uplifting, tender and merciless, all at once — a remarkable achievement for one novel.”
Philadelphia Enquirer:
“Ordinary people — and how extraordinary they can be…Jones allows his characters their foolishness without denying them the dignity that comes from doing the best they can…One can’t help but look forward to Jones’s next book.”
Robert Hass:
“Jones has a jeweler’s eye for the lyric conjunctions of the ordinary and the grotesque, and he puts it to good use.”
Michael Chabon:
“In Louis B. Jones, as in no other writer working today, a sense of moral outrage is yoked, oddly and with extraordinary power, to a thrilling gift for lyrical prose.”
Don Carpenter:
“A cheeseburger kind of writer.”