His first novel, The Dreamers (Harper and Row, 1989), tells the story of an American graduate student studying the Anschluss in Vienna, who gets into a rather tortured affair with an Austrian woman and her young, fatherless son.
I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company was named one of the best novels of the year by The Boston Globe, Salon magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor.
Additional nonfiction works by Hall include: The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia (Godine, 1994) and Madeleine's World: A Biography of a Three-Year-Old (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997).
Madeleine's World is a novelist's take on the ideas of Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist who based many of his theories on observations of his own children.
Hall, by watching his own daughter's development over three years, wrote a book speculating on what the growth of human consciousness might look like from the inside.