Nicole Krauss (born August 18, 1974)[1] is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages.

She also curated a reading series with Fiona Maazel at the Russian Samovar, a restaurant in New York City co-founded by Roman Kaplan, Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

[17] In 1996 Krauss was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and enrolled in a master's program at Somerville College, Oxford,[2] where she wrote a thesis on the American artist Joseph Cornell.

A meditation on memory and personal history, solitude and intimacy, the novel won praise from Susan Sontag and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award.

[25] Francesca Segal, writing in the Financial Times, describes it as a "richly layered tale of two lives" that explores "ideas of identity and belonging – and the lure of the Tel Aviv Hilton".

These themes are readily appreciable beginning in her first novel Man Walks into a Room, wherein the protagonist loses years of lived memory while retaining all cognitive function.

In a departure from her earlier work, Krauss's later novels progressively question and abandon traditional narrative structure in pursuit of themes more characteristic of late postmodern literature.

The History of Love and Forest Dark employ techniques of metafiction and intertextuality, questioning the veracity of the novel's form and antagonizing the traditional contract between reader and text.

[31][32] The co-protagonist of Forest Dark in particular is a novelist who shares the author's name and several biographical details, including reflections on a failed marriage to a man with whom the character has two children, considerations of the constraints of fiction, a fascination with Franz Kafka's life and writing, and a preoccupation with "Jewish mysticism, Israel and creation.

[37] Krauss subsequently embarked on a five-year relationship with the Israeli journalist and novelist Gon Ben Ari, whom she met when she granted him an interview several years earlier.