Ruth Franklin is a freelance book critic and the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. She has written for many publications, including The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. A past Guggenheim Fellow, she is currently a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY, where she is working on a biography of the American writer Shirley Jackson.