“Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like a paleontologist.”

American author

Nicole Krauss is an American novelist known for fiction that has reached a wide international readership. She is best known for her four novels, Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017). Her work has been translated into 35 languages. Krauss has also had fiction published in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire. She was included in Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and her stories have appeared in several editions of The Best American Short Stories, including 2003, 2008, 2019 and 2021.