POSTPONED Paperback Launch: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, with editor Robin Desser

Claire Messud’s previous novel, The Emperor’s Children, was a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second novel, The Last Life, was a PW Best Book of the Year and Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice. All four books were New York Times Notables. She has received Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Robin Desser has worked at the Knopf Publishing Group since 1998 and this year was named Vice President, Editorial Director of Alfred A. Knopf. She was presented with the Center for Fiction’s Maxwell E. Perkins Award in 2013, which honors the work of an editor, publisher, or agent who over the course of his or her career has discovered, nurtured and championed writers of fiction in the United States. Among the critically acclaimed and bestselling books and authors with whom she has worked, first at Vintage, where she served for eight years, and then at Knopf, are many notable debuts: Lorraine Adams’s Harbor; Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street; Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory; Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior; Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha; Amy Greene’s Bloodroot; David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars; Nam Le’s The Boat; Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner; and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican.