Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at nine. He is a graduate of both Princeton University (BA in Russian Literature) and New York University (MFA in Fiction). Following the completion of his studies, Mr. Fishman received residencies and fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, among others. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The New Republic, The Nation, The London Review o f Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and other publications.
His first novel, A Replacement Life (HarperCollins), was published in 2014 to high critical acclaim. A front-cover review in The New York Times Book Review called it "bold, ambitious and wickedly smart... The only problem with this novel is that its covers are too close together." A Replacement Life was listed by The New York Times among the 100 Notable Books of 2014 and won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal. His second novel, Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo has also been selected as one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books when it was published in 2016. Both novels received rave reviews from numerous notable publications, including The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Vogue, and others. Boris Fishman teaches in Princeton University's Creative Writing Program.