"No one writing about art today comes closer than Siri Hustvedt to the elusive strangeness of a great painting." --Calvin Tomkins"As an essayist she is perhaps without peer." --"The Scotland Herald""She brings both knowledge and an artist's insight to the discussion of memory, language, and personal identity. . . . It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear." --Hilary Mantel"[Hustvedt] gives you the illusion of seeing as if for the first time works of art that you thought you knew well. After reading her . . . most prose about art seems merely perfunctory." --"Modern Painters""Hustvedt thinks her way through complex subject matter with the effortless clarity of a poised and skeptical outsider who has little time for nonsense or the blithe reductionist certainties of supposed experts. . . . Hustvedt is a calm traveler on the storm-tossed seas of the self. Her odyssey . . . deepens understanding." --Lisa Appignanesi

Siri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in English literature and is the internationally acclaimed author of five novels, "The Sorrows of an American, ""What I Loved, ""The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, ""The Blindfold, " and "The Summer Without Men, " as well as a growing body of nonfiction including, "A Plea for Eros "and "Mysteries of the Rectangle, "and an interdisciplinary investigation of the body and mind in "The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. "She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna.She lives in Brooklyn.