Contributors' Notes, Volume 23, #1
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STEVE AMICK lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His short stories have been broadcast on National Public Radio and have appeared in Southern Review, River City, Story, and McSweeney's, and in the anthology The Sound of Writing (Doubleday, 1991).
NATHANIEL BELLOWS's first novel, On This Day, will be published by HarperCollins in 2003. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and Yale Review.
BETH ARCHER BROMBERT is a professional translator and author. Her most recent book is Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat, published by Little, Brown in 1996.
JAMES BROWN has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in Creative Writing and a Nelson Algren Award in Short Fiction from the Chicago Tribune. "Fire" is from his recently completed memoir, The Los Angeles Diaries, which has just been bought by Morrow/HarperCollins. Other pieces from this book have appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and Santa Monica Review. He has published several novels, including Lucky Town with Harcourt and The Second Story Theatre with Storyline Press. He was a Bread Loaf Fellow in Fiction in 1986. (read "Fire")
PETER CAMERON's fourth book is The City of Your Final Destination. His previous novels include The Weekend (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994) and Andorra (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), and his work has appeared in the New Yorker and Paris Review.
CLARE CAVANAGH is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Northwestern University. Her book Poetry and Power: Russia, Poland and the West is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
ROBERT COHEN is the author of three novels, Inspired Sleep, The Here and Now, and The Organ Builder, as well as a collection of stories, The Varieties of Romantic Experience. He teaches at Middlebury College.
PETER COOLEY has a new book, A Place Made of Starlight, coming out at the end of this year from Carnegie Mellon. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2002, New Letters, Commonweal, and Prairie Schooner. He has taught creative writing at Tulane since 1975.
MICHAEL DUMANIS received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1999, and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston. Recent poems of his have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, CutBank, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Phoebe, Prairie Schooner, and Seneca Review. (read "Ode")
GEORGE EDWARDS is a composer and MacDowell Professor of Music at Columbia University. His essays on music have appeared in Partisan Review, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, and Current Musicology, and in the anthology Haydn Studies (Cambridge University Press).
JONATHAN FINK teaches creative writing at Emerson College and the University of Massachusetts-Boston. His poems have received awards from the Atlantic Monthly and the Associated Writing Programs, and this summer he was a work-study scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Southern Poetry Review, Willow Springs, and Texas Review, among other publications.
NICK FLYNN's first book, Some Ether, won the inaugural PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. The poems in this issue are from Blind Huber (Graywolf Press, forthcoming). He currently lives in Rome. (read "Swarm")
CAROL FROST has poems forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Paris Review, and Southern Review. Her essay on the stories of George P. Elliott appeared recently in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Volume 244).
NATALIA GINZBURG (1916-1990) was one of the most renowned and distinctive voices in postwar Italian literature, revered for her inimitable style and her memorable depiction of private lives in a disrupted social landscape. A prolific novelist, dramatist, and essayist, she is best known in this country for her novels All Our Yesterdays, The City and the House, and Voices in the Evening, and for her autobiographical work entitled The Things We Used to Say. The essay included here is taken from A Place to Love, and Other Essays of Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, which will be published this spring by Seven Stories Press.
SUSAN HAHN is a poet and playwright, and the editor of TriQuarterly magazine. Her five books of poetry include Holiday (2001) and Mother in Summer (2002).
BOB HICOK's books are Animal Soul, which is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Plus Shipping, and The Legend of Light.
MICHAEL HOFMANN is a poet whose books include Approximately Nowhere (Faber & Faber) and K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems (Ecco), and the translator of numerous works (among them, Kafka's Amerika, published as The Man Who Disappeared by Penguin UK) from German to English. He won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize in 1999 for his translation of Joseph Roth's The Tale of the 1002nd Night.
MICHAEL R. KATZ has translated a series of novels from Russian to English, including Dostoevsky's The Devils, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and works by Herzen and Chernyshevsky. He is also the author of monographs on Russian literary ballads and on dreams in nineteenth-century Russian fiction. His B.A. is from Williams College, and he did his graduate work at Oxford University. Before becoming Dean of Language Schools and School abroad at Middlebury College, he taught Russian language and literature at Williams College and at the University of Texas.
JOANN KOBIN's short fiction has appeared previously in New England Review, as well as in Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Witness, the Boston Globe Magazine, and many other journals and anthologies. A novel in stories, Woman Made of Sand, has recently been published by Delphinium Books. Several of the stories in that book originally appeared in NER.
IVAN KRAUS was born in Prague in 1939 and lived there until 1968, when he moved to Germany after the Soviet occupation. He is the author of ten books, as well as numerous plays and screenplays. His work has also been included in many anthologies in England, France, Germany, and elsewhere. "Official Forms" originally appeared in Numbers in Heaven (1984), published in Czech during his exile in Switzerland. He currently lives in Paris.
RICHARD LINGEMAN, who lives in Manhattan, is currently a senior editor of the Nation, where he has also been executive editor. Born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and a graduate of Haverford College, he has worked as a freelance journalist, contributing to the New York Times Magazine and many other publications. He has also been an editor and reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. Among the books he has published are Small Town America (an American Book Award nominee) and a two-volume biography of Theodore Dreiser, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945.
DAVID H. LYNN is editor of the Kenyon Review. His new novel, Wrestling with Gabriel, will appear in the fall of 2002.
GARY MARGOLIS is Director of the Center for Counseling and Human Relations and Associate Professor of English at Middlebury College. His new book of poems is Fire in the Orchard (Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh).
J. D. MCCLATCHY teaches at Yale. His fifth book of poems, Hazmat, will be published by Knopf in the fall of 2002, along with his edition of James Merrill's Collected Novels and Plays. He has also recently edited a collection of new translations of Horace's odes by thirty-five leading poets.
KEITH LEE MORRIS's fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Puerto Del Sol, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Manoa. He claims Idaho as his home state, but now teaches creative writing and journalism at Clemson University, where he also serves as associate editor of the South Carolina Review. (read "The Children of Dead State Troopers")
CARL PHILLIPS is the author of five books of poems, most recently The Tether (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
JOSEPH ROTH was born in 1894 in what is now western Ukraine. He worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin until Hitler's rise to power forced him to flee to France in 1933. The author of such celebrated novels as The Radetsky March and The Emperor's Tomb, Roth died in Paris in 1939.
NICKY SCHILDKRAUT will be awarded an M.F.A. in creative writing this May by the University of Florida in Gainesville. She has a poem forthcoming in the Mississippi Review. In the fall of 1999 she read her prize-winning villanelle and gave a short interview on National Public Radio in Boston. Currently she lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she teaches poetry and composition.
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ's books include the novels Leaving Brooklyn, Disturbances in the Field, and In the Family Way: An Urban Comedy, as well as the memoir Ruined by Reading. Her first collection of poetry, In Solitary, is appearing this spring from Sheep Meadow Press. Her translation from the Italian of Smoke Over Birkenau, by Liana Millu, won the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award in 1991.
DAVID SEMANKI received his M.F.A. from Columbia University. He has been published in the New Yorker and has poems forthcoming in the Paris Review, Agni, and the New York Times Book Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
NEIL SHEPARD has published two books of poetry, Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat (1993) and I'm Here Because I Lost My Way (1998), both from Mid-List Press. His poems have recently appeared in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Boulevard, Notre Dame Review, TriQuarterly, and Ontario Review. He teaches at Johnson State College in Vermont and edits the Green Mountains Review.
ITALO SVEVO(1861-1928), was born Ettore Schmitz in Trieste and lived in that city all his life. His other works include Una Vita (1892) and The Confessions of Zeno (1923), as well as plays and several collections of short stories. Senilità (newly translated as Emilio's Carnival), from which the excerpt in this issue is taken, was James Joyce's favorite of Svevo's novels.
GERALD TURNER has been translating modern Czech and Slovak writing for over twenty years. Under the pseudonym of A. G. Brain, he translated many banned authors during the 1980s, including Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma, Karel Pecka, and Ludvík Vaculík. His recent translations include Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia by Michal Viewegh.
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI was born in Lvov, Poland in 1945. His previous books, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the poetry collections Tremor (1985), Canvas (1992), and Mysticism for Beginners (1998); and the essay collections Two Cities (1995) and Another Beauty (2000). He currently lives in Paris and Houston.