JOSEPH SKIBELL is the author of three novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, and A Curable Romantic, and the forthcoming nonfiction work Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. He has won the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Turner Prize for First Fiction. A recent Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, he is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. A native Texan, he lives in Atlanta and Tesuque, New Mexico. (Author photo by Laura Noel.)