Jess Walter, author of the just about to be released “So Far Gone,” is one of my favorite contemporary novelists.

He’s been something of a shapeshifter over the course of his career, first establishing himself as a crime writer, including in the Edgar Award-winning “Citizen Vince.” “The Zero,” from 2006, uses Walter’s base in crime fiction set against the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the service of a kind of hybrid noir that, through the lens of one character, brilliantly captures our collective disorientation in those first weeks and months post-attack.

“The Financial Lives of Poets” (2009) is a medium-dark domestic comedy about a journalist who (sort of) turns to crime to make ends meet as his profession collapses around him. “Beautiful Ruins” (2013) is my favorite of Walter’s novels,

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