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Wendy Lesser (born 1952) is an American critic, novelist, and editor based in Berkeley, California.

Lesser did her undergraduate work at Harvard College and her graduate work at University of California, Berkeley, with time in between at King's College, Cambridge. She is the founding editor of the arts journal The Threepenny Review, and author of eight books, most recently her first novel, The Pagoda in the Garden (Other Press, 2005), and her latest nonfiction book, Room for Doubt (Pantheon, 2007).

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.