Elisa Albert is the author of the novel “The Book of Dahlia” and a story collection, “How This Night is Different.”

Entertainment Weekly called “The Book of Dahlia” one of the ten best novels of 2008, writing that “what begins as a darkly funny novel develops quickly into a genuine tragedy, though it’s unlike any you’ve read before.” The New Yorker added that “Albert writes with the black humor of Lorrie Moore and a pathos that is uniquely her own, all the more blistering for being slyly invoked.”

In its review of “How This Night Is Different,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted that “Albert’s protagonists are young Americans each imbued with an uncannily sharp voice, each boldly confronting their intricately conflicted lives, each looking on the world with convincing lucidity and moving joie de vivre.”

She is the editor of the anthology “Freud’s Blind Spot: Writers on Siblings,” due out from Free Press in November.  She is currently Writer in Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Holland. 

This story is forthcoming in Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging, edited by Derek Rubin, to be published by Brandeis University Press in November.

Visit her online at www.elisaalbert.com.