Forty-One False Starts

JANET MALCOLM is widely considered to be America's pre-eminent literary journalist. She is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of several critically acclaimed books, including In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, all published by Granta. She won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award in Biography for Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice [Yale University Press] in 2008. She lives in New York.