Marisa Silver is the author of The Mysteries (2021), Little Nothing (2016), a New York Times Editor's Choice, and winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction, Mary Coin (2013), a New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller's Award, and an NPR and BBC Best Book of the Year, Alone With You (2010), The God of War (2008), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, No Direction Home (2005), and Babe in Paradise (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her short fiction has won the O. Henry Prize and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic.com and many other publications, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies.

In 2018, Silver was awarded the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. In 2017, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts. She teaches at The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.