Jess Walter makes his way over the Cascades from his Spokane hometown to read from his eagerly-awaited new novel, Beautiful Ruins (Harper). Coming in the wake of Over Tumbled Graves, Land of the Blind, the Edgar Award-winning Citizen Vince, and his recent, bestselling The Financial Lives of the Poets, Jess Walter is again on the mark with this book that goes from an Italian coast fifty years ago to a movie studio thousands of miles away many years later. "Within a page-turner of a plot, these triumphantly vulnerable characters leap off the page to take up permanent residence in your inner life. The effect is so powerful that to be untouched by Beautiful Ruins might well be like having no inner life at all." – Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. "Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece." – Richard Russo.