Joan Silber


Joan Silber is an American novelist and short story writer. She won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Improvement.

Biography

Joan Silber was born in 1945. She grew up in Millburn, New Jersey. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and obtained an M.A. from New York University. She taught at NYU and now teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
Silber's work has been selected for The O. Henry Prize Stories six times—in 2003, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015, and 2021. It also appeared in the Best American Short Stories 2015, and won The Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, ''Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Tin House, Epoch, The Southern Review, Agni, The Colorado Review,'' and other publications.

Novels

Secrets of Happiness Improvement The Size of the World Lucky Us In the City
  • ''Household Words''

Short fiction

;CollectionsFools Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories
  • ''In My Other Life''

Nonfiction

  • ''The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes''

Honors and awards

She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.