Jon Fasman is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Geographer's Library (2005) and The Unpossessed City (2008), which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions award. He is an online editor and multimedia producer for The Economist, and also writes for the United States and Books and Arts section of the newspaper. He has written about food, books and travel for The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Jon was born in Chicago and raised in Washington, DC, where now lives with his wife and son. He was educated at Brown and Oxford universities, and has lived in Rhode Island, Brooklyn, Oxford, London, Moscow, where he has worked mostly as a journalist, but also as a security guard, dishwasher, teacher, and researcher, but not, to his chagrin, as a bartender. Yet. When not reading or writing, he enjoys either being in his kitchen or in a foreign country. Jon has no favorite color, food, novel, song, play, flower, city, or language. His favorite animal is the panda and his favorite subway is Moscow's.