Some Favorite Writers: Joan Silber

Novelist Joan Silber has written nine books of fiction including Improvement (2017), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. The New York Times calls her most recent novel, Secrets of Happiness (2021), “humane, elegant and wise.”

Readings are followed by discussion with the author and UCLA professor Mona Simpson, who organizes this series. Copresented by the UCLA Department of English.

Limited books will be available for purchase.

BIOS

Joan Silber is the author of nine books of fiction. The most recent is Secrets of Happiness (May 2021). 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. Her previous book, 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, taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.

Mona Simpson is the best-selling author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook. Off Keck Road was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is on the faculty at UCLA. In 2020, she was named publisher of The Paris Review.