Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book columnist for The Washington Post and a contributor to the New York Review of Books and other literary periodicals. He is the author of the memoir, An Open Book, which received the Ohioana Award for nonfiction; the Edgar Award-winning On Conan Doyle, and Bound to Please, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His other books include the essay collections Readings, Book by Book, Classics for Pleasure, and Browsings. He writes frequently about classic fantasy, horror, sf and detective fiction and is finishing a book surveying late 19th and early 20th-century British popular fiction.