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p>Joseph Skibell's debut novel (A Blessing on the Moon) received the prestigious Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters.

The book was named one of the year's best by Publishers Weekly, Le Monde and Amazon.com, and has been translated into half a dozen languages.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Patrick Giles, said of A Blessing on the Moon: "Daring in its haunting, often painful honesty, dense in thoughtful observation and unsparing incident, the novel is confirmation that no subject lies beyond the grasp of a gifted, committed imagination."

Skibell's second novel, The English Disease, received the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. According to the Jerusalem Report: "Skibell's latest is a witty and profound, moving and comic portrait of a crabby, middle-aged musicologist with a typically Jewish, post-Holocaust worldview. As he did in his first work, Skibell makes the potentially stale fresh, thanks to incisive, original images that redeem and shed new glimpses on what may, at first, appear to be old themes. Skibell succeeds, all the while giving us a complex work that, in testament to his gifts as a storyteller, is always a joy to read."

Skibell's third novel, A Curable Romantic, is forthcoming from Algonquin in 2010.

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