Joan Silber

Joan Silber is an American short fiction writer and novelist with a career spanning more than four decades. Born in Millburn, New Jersey, she studied at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of eight books of fiction, including Ideas of Heaven (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize; The Size of the World (2008); Fools (2013); Improvement (2017); and Secrets of Happiness (2021). Improvement (2017) is a formally innovative linked story collection in which characters' lives intersect in unexpected ways across different times and places, exploring the theme of what it means for a life to improve. The book won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2018 and the Story Prize, and established Silber as one of the most accomplished practitioners of the short form in contemporary American fiction. Silber is known for the formal intelligence and emotional wisdom of her fiction, her ability to compress enormous spans of time and experience into compact narratives, and her unfailingly precise and supple prose. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York.