Ashley Kaplan, Brett: - Rare Stuff is the first novel by Brett Ashley Kaplan, author of three non-fiction books on topics related to the Holocaust and Jewish-American literature. She is director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is a professor and director of graduate studies for the Program in Comparative and World Literature. Her writing has been published in Salon, Haaretz, The Conversation, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Contemporary Literature, and The Jewish Review of Books among others. Named for Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, she is at work on a second novel, Vandervelde Downs, about the recovery of Nazi-looted objects found in a Vietnamese refugee center in provincial England.