About
Diane Josefowicz is a writer, historian, editor, and translator.
She is the author of two novels: The Great Houses of Pill Hill (Soho Press, 2026, forthcoming) and Ready, Set, Oh: A Novel (Flexible Press, 2022). She is also the author of a novella, L'Air du Temps (1985), published by Regal House in 2024; and Guardians & Saints: Stories, Cornerstone Press, published by Cornerstone Press in 2025.
As a historian, she is also the author, with Jed Z. Buchwald, of two histories of Egyptology, The Riddle of the Rosetta (2020) and The Zodiac of Paris (2010), both from Princeton University Press.
Her fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in The Boston Globe, Conjunctions, Fence, Dame, LA Review of Books, Liber, Exacting Clam, L'Esprit, and elsewhere. She serves as reviews editor at Necessary Fiction, senior editor for translation at The Adroit Journal, and as managing editor of The Victorian Web, the internet's oldest and largest site devoted to Victoriana.
She holds an MFA from Columbia University, a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BA from Brown University. She grew up outside Providence, where she now lives with her family.
Featured Work
Guardians & Saints: Stories
We're born unfinished, in need of everything-love, food, attention, care. The linked stories in Guardians & Saints explore the ways in which modern orphans fail to thrive. A girl loses her mother only to re-find her, in altered form, in a grim institutional afterlife. A group of friends spins helplessly around the death of a beloved teacher when his selfless pedagogy is called into question. Faced with the incapacity of those they depend on, Diane Josefowicz's characters appeal, with varying degrees of success, to stand-ins: teachers, mentors, therapists, guardians, and, occasionally, saints.
"An exceptionally fine hand-stitched quilt, meticulously and lovingly constructed."
-Valerie Vogrin, author of Things We'll Need for the Coming Difficulties
"Gorgeously rhythmic and constantly surprising."
-Beth Bosworth, author of The Source of Life and Other Stories
"An artful collection of riveting and potent stories."
-Aida Zilelian, author of All the Ways We Lied
"Josefowicz captures the aching loneliness of childhood and its lasting impact on our struggle for connection."
-Rebekah Bergman, author of The Museum of Human History
"Gorgeously written . . . a melancholy, funny, deeply humane book about people transcending their own worst selves."
-Kim Magowan, author of Don't Take This the Wrong Way
"Marked by prose that makes the ordinary strange and dangerous. these unsettling, addictive tales are haunting in the best sense."
-Eileen Kelly, author of Small Wonder
Other Works
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L'Air du Temps (1985)
2024
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L'Air du Temps (1985)
2024
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Ready, Set, Oh
2022
