Laura Jacobs

Laura Jacobs has a luminous eye for detail, social and physical. It can be glimpsed in her writings on fashion and culture or in her novels, such as her newest,

The Bird Catcher. It's worlds aflutter.

Jacobs traces the book's seven-year evolution, the elements of music and time, the popularity of taxidermy in the Victorian era, and how her research led her to skin a bird she found in Riverside Park.

Read an excerpt from The Bird Catcher.