Laura van den Berg is the author of two short story collections and two novels, most recently The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Her honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pushcart Prize, and an O. Henry Award. Born and raised in Florida, Laura currently lives in Cambridge, MA, where she is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University.