Shopping cart (0 items) |
RSS

Contents

April 12, 1990 • Volume 37, Number 6

LETTERS

Contributors

John Russell was formerly Chief Art Critic of The New York Times, to which he continues to be a contributor. He is at work on a short history of the museum since 1800. (March 2003)

Joseph Connors, the Director of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence, writes on Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture. He was formerly Director of the American Academy in Rome and professor of art history at Columbia.

John Higham is Professor of History Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University and the editor of Civil Rights and Social Wrongs: Black—White Relations Since World War II, which has just been published. (November 1997)

James Fallows is National Correspondent for The Atlantic and author, most recently, of Free Flight. (March 2002)

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. His latest book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.


Felix Rohatyn is an investment banker and has been a governor of the New York Stock Exchange, Chairman of the New York Municipal Assistance Corporation, and US Ambassador to France. (October 2008)

Quentin Skinner is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University. His most recent books are Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes and Liberty Before Liberalism. (November 2000)

Jonathan Spence is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. Among his books are The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, The Death of Woman Wang, and Return to Dragon Mountain. (December 2011)

James M. McPherson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Among his other books are For Cause and Comrades, Drawn with the Sword, What They Fought For, Gettysburg, and Fields of Fury. A professor at Princeton University, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-four novels, including The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, most recently, Folly and Glory. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, and Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (published by New York Review Books). He lives in Archer City, Texas.

David Lodge is a novelist and critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, England. His novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, and Author, Author. His most recent works of criticism are Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. His latest collection of poems, White Egrets, will be published next year. (November 2009)

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville’s novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. A Death in Summer, a novel written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, was published in July 2011.


Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. His Collected Poems in English will be published next spring. He died in 1996. (January 2000)

Adam Michnik is Editor in Chief of the Warsaw daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. His piece in this issue will appear in Andrei Sakharov and Human Rights, a collection of Sakharov’s writings that is being published by the Council of Europe this month. (January 2011)

J. M. Coetzee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, is currently a visiting professor of humanities at the University of Adelaide. His newest book, *Summertime*, was published in 2009.

Breyten Breytenbach is the author of, among other books, True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, which details his years in the prisons of the apartheid regime in South Africa. (November 1997)

Toni Morrison, Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton, is the author of seven novels. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. (August 2001)

Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the author of numerous novels and collections of essays, including The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and most recently, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism.

William Shawcross is the author of several books on Cambodia. (December 1996)

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories, I, Etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and seven works of nonfiction, among them Where the Stress Falls and Regarding the Pain of Others. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work; in 2003, she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

Margaret Atwood is the author of eleven novels, among them The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Her latest novel, The Year of the Flood, was published in 2009.
 (April 2010)

Michael Ondaatje’s novels are Coming Through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, and Anil’s Ghost. His books of poetry include The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. His most recent book is The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. His many plays include The Caretaker, The Birthday Party, and Moonlight. Please also see haroldpinter.org.

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) was born in Buenos Aires, the child of wealthy parents. He began to write in the early Thirties, and his stories appeared in the influential magazine Sur, through which he met his wife, the painter and writer Silvina Ocampo, as well Jorge Luis Borges, who was to become his mentor, friend, and collaborator. In 1940, after writing several novice works, Bioy published the novella The Invention of Morel, the first of his books to satisfy him, and the first in which he hit his characteristic note of uncanny and unexpectedly harrowing humor. Later publications include stories and novels, among them A Plan for Escape, A Dream of Heroes, and Asleep in the Sun. Bioy also collaborated with Borges on an Anthology of Fantastic Literature and a series of satirical sketches written under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq.

Jakov Lind (1927-2007) was born Heinz Jakov Landwirth into an educated Jewish family in Vienna. After the 1938 Anschluss, Lind and one of his sisters were sent for safety to Holland, from where they were join their parents in Palestine; this proved impossible, and following the occupation of Holland, Lind, who was already fluent in Dutch, had no choice but to go into hiding. Taking the name of Jan Gerrit Overbeek—”sailing under a false self,” as he would later describe it—he worked on a barge traveling up and down the Rhine. When the Allies began to bomb the industrial cities of the Rhine, Lind/Overbeek moved to Germany, where he was employed by a Nazi government ministry in Berlin. The end of the war allowed Lind to join his family in Palestine, but it was not long before he returned to Europe, studying drama in Vienna and, in 1954, settling in London, where he began work on the stories that were published in 1962 as Soul of Wood. Lind’s other books in German include the novels Landscape in Concrete and Ergo and, in English, four volumes of autobiography, two novels, and numerous stories. Lind was also a playwright and film director, as well as a talented visual artist. In a eulogy delivered at Lind’s funeral, Anthony Rudolf described Lind as “A coyote, a trickster…. A wicked smile played around his mouth, while witty aphorisms and deep insights tripped off his lips. He emanated inner strength—and an electric intelligence that we all wanted to emulate.”

Jean Starobinski is Professor Emeritus of French literature at the University of Geneva. Blessings in Disguise and Largesse are among his works in English. A translation of his recent Action et réaction is to appear later this year. (May 2003)

M. F. Perutz, former Chairman of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962. He is the author of Is Science Necessary?, Protein Structure, and, most recently, I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier. (November 2001)