JOSEPH CUOMO has recently completed his first novel. He is also the director of Queens College Evening Readings, which he founded in 1976.
RUTH FRANKLIN has been an editor at The New Republic since 1999. Her criticism also appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and other publications. She is currently at work on a book about literature on the Holocaust.
MICHAEL HOFMANN was born in 1957 in Freiburg, Germany, and came to England in 1961. He has published four volumes of poems and won a Cholmondeley Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for poetry. His translations have won many awards, including the Independent’s Foreign Fiction Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. His reviews and criticism are gathered in Behind the Lines (2001). He edited The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems (2005), and his most recent work is the translation of the selected poems of Durs Grünbein, Ashes for Breakfast (2006).
ARTHUR LUBOW is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, where he writes on cultural subjects. He is the author of The Reporter Who Would Be King, a biography of Richard Harding Davis, the American war correspondent and fin-de-siècle novelist.
TIM PARKS was born in Manchester, England, in 1954, grew up in London, and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy, where he has lived ever since. He has written eleven novels, including Europa, Destiny, Rapids, and Cleaver, as well as three nonfiction accounts of life in northern Italy (most recently, A Season with Verona), a collection of narrative essays, Adultery and Other Diversions, and a history of the Medici bank in fifteenth-century Florence, Medici Money. His many translations from the Italian include works by Alberto Moravia, Antonio Tabucchi, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Calasso. He lectures on literary translation in Milan.
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT is host and producer of public radio’s premier literary talk show, Bookworm, which he created for KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, California, in 1989. Since that time, with the funding of the Lannan Foundation, Bookworm has achieved a national audience and reputation. Mr. Silverblatt has conducted nearly nine hundred interviews with many leading American and international writers. He was born in New York and educated at the State University in Buffalo and Johns Hopkins University. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, where he worked in public relations and script development for the motion picture industry.
CHARLES SIMIC is a poet, essayist, and translator. He was born in Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. Since 1967 he has published twenty books of his own poetry (most recently The Voice at 3:00 A.M. and My Noiseless Entourage), seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and the MacArthur Fellowship. He is poetry editor of The Paris Review and professor emeritus of the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973.
ELEANOR WACHTEL is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Based in Toronto, she is the host of CBC Radio’s Writers & Company and The Arts Tonight. Three books of her interviews have been published: Original Minds, Writers & Company, and More Writers & Company.
About the Editor
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ is the author of nineteen works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and memoir; most recently, the novel Writing on the Wall. She has been nominated for the National Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and she won the PEN Renato Poggioli Award for Translation in 1991.
Notes
1
Ruth Franklin’s essay was written before Luftkrieg und Literatur was published in English in 2003 as On the Natural History of Destruction. The quoted passages are Franklin’s translations and differ slightly from the published version, translated by Anthea Bell.