[1][2][3] Ball was born into a middle-class, English-speaking Irish-Sicilian family in Port Jefferson, New York, on Long Island.

These were followed in 2009 by The Way Through Doors, and in 2011, The Curfew, whose style The New Yorker described as "[lying] at some oscillating coordinate between Kafka and Calvino: swift, intense fables composed of equal parts wonder and dread.

[7] On June 30 of that year Ball published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times suggesting that all American citizens be incarcerated periodically, as a civic duty.

The article likens this incarceration to already existing jury duty and states that no one, not even sitting politicians, judges or military officers would be free from it.

For nearly twenty years, he was on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he taught courses on lying, ambiguity, dreaming, and walking.