Novelist and Memoirist. Winner of a slew of prizes and awards including: National Endowment for the Arts, a NEA Japan Fellowship Prize, two New York State Fellowships for the Arts, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Professor at the University of Florida. Canadian by birth; probably pretty funny and/or polite. 
 

"The news media seems to be our twenty-first century version of th enineteenth-century village gossip. Rumor and speculation have always been the secret pleasure of the novel." 

- Jill Ciment