"Shelley Jackson is a gifted writer . . . who, very playfully, very disturbingly, takes the body apart and puts it back together again, always in startlingly imaginative ways. These tales of the anatomy's ludicrous sorrows are deliciously crafted, maintaining always a fine balance between outrageous comedy and profound melancholy. She is . . . one of the most poised and original talents of her generation." —Robert Coover

BIO
SHELLEY JACKSON was extracted from the bum leg of a water buffalo in 1963 in the Philippines and grew up complaining in Berkeley, California. She has spent most of her life in used bookstores, smearing unidentified substances on their spines, and is duly obsessed with books: paper, glue, and ink. Nonetheless, she is most widely recognized for an electronic text, Patchwork Girl, a hypertext reworking of the Frankenstein myth, and for SKIN, a story published in tattoos on the skin of volunteers. Meanwhile, her fiction has been appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Grand Street, The Paris Review, and on many restaurant napkins. Her first book, The Melancholy of Anatomy, was published by Anchor in April 2002. Shelley Jackson also illustrates children's books, including two of her own, The Old Woman and the Wave and Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog. Her new novel, Half Life, was published by Harper Collins in 2006.

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