“Barrett’s book is an ode to fiction’s unique ability to illuminate history—not as fact but as felt experience.” – The New Yorker“I was therefore overjoyed to learn of her new book, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. Here at last, I thought, was a meditation from one of its leading practitioners on this peculiar species of fiction set in the past that has never sat very comfortably under the label ‘historical fiction.’… In Dust and Light, she teases apart her own idiosyncratic process for the benefit of readers and writers alike” – Los Angeles Book Review

Andrea Barrett is the author of the National Book Award–winning Ship Fever, Voyage of the Narwhal, Servants of the Map, Natural History, and other works of fiction. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an NEA Fellowship, and the Rea Award for the Short Story, and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in the Adirondacks.