Laura Jacobs is an award-winning contributing editor at Vanity Fair and is the dance critic for The New Criterion. She has written for many other publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Village Voice, The New Republic, The Boston Phoenix, and The Chicago Reader. The Bird Catcher is her second novel. Her first, Women About Town, was a Literary Guild Selection, and was published in France and Poland. She lives in New York City with her husband, the writer James Wolcott, who took this photograph in Riverside Park.