Joan Silber is the author of ten books of fiction. The most recent is Mercy.  Secrets of Happiness was a Washington Post Best Book of the year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year.  Her novel, Improvement, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She also received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Fools was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Size of the World was a finalist for the LA Times Fiction Prize, and Ideas of Heaven was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She is also the author of The Art of Time in Fiction. She lives in New York and taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.