Rick Whitaker is an author, critic, and producer of events at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies.  His essays, articles, and reviews have been published in the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement (UK), Washington Post, New York Observer, Village Voice, Slate, Salon, Ballet Review, Befrois, Psychology Tomorrow, and The Nervous Breakdown. His most recent book, An Honest Ghost, a novel composed entirely of unedited sentences from more than 500 books (with each sentence attributed to its source), was chosen by John Ashbery as a 2013 Book of the Year for the TLS and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award and the Lambda Literary Prize for fiction.