Ruth Franklin is a book critic and biographer. Her most recent book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2016 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and the Plutarch Award. Her reviews and essays appear often in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.