Joshua Ferris was born in Chicago in 1975. His first novel, Then We Came to the End, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. It was a National Book Award Finalist and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, is The Unnamed.

His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Tin House, among other publications. He lives in New York.

Joshua Ferris was also kind enough to contribute to an in-house newsletters 'In praise of..' section. He chose fans'. And here it is:

In praise of ... Fans

I don't like a fan blowing on me, I catch cold. Plus, constant blowing is distracting. Although rotating fans are the worst. I want to scream at them, "Make up your mind!" Half the time they're just cooling the wall. But apparently fans do cut down on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. That's in a book I read. I don't know who determined that. Or how. What kind of study would you have to conduct to put that in a book? I don't know how any study is done, period. Really the only reason I like fans and choose to praise them is because for the longest time I was scared of flying.

I was afraid of permanent engine failure. In part because I was on a plane once in which the engine failed. It wasn't the engine engine, it was the in-cabin air-circulating engine, so it just seemed from the plastic burning smell that the plane was on fire and that we were all going to die. There were even people holding hands across the aisle, crying and saying their goodbyes. Afterwards it was the idea of the fan that restored some of my confidence. If a fan can operate overnight, I concluded, with such fine efficiency, and never have to be serviced, then an engine that's serviced all the time can go on a 3-hour trip no problem. That made flying much easier until the fan I was using broke. I keep it on my nightstand so my wife's snoring doesn't wake me up (I wouldn't have the fan blowing on me). Although sometimes she snores so violently that it vibrates the bed. That only happens when she drinks. It wakes me up without fail. I bought another fan to drown out the snoring and to restore my confidence once again, but now that one is acting up. It sounds, eerily, like the dying engines of a DC-10. Now that I'm no longer scared of flying, it is the airplane that has restored my confidence in fans. This is really only in praise of working fans.