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Contents

October 17, 1996 • Volume 43, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

Gabriele Annan is a book and film critic living in London. (March 2006)

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard. His books include The Marketplace of Ideas, American Studies and The Metaphysical Club.

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.

John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003) was a novelist, screenwriter and critic. His final novel is entitled Nothing Lost.

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) was Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at NYU. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here?, Justice in Robes, Freedom’s Law, and Justice for Hedgehogs. He was the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact” and he was recently awarded the Balzan Prize for his “fundamental contributions to Jurisprudence.”


Robert Conquest, a Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author of The Great Terror. (March 1997)

Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London and the author of In the Blood. (April 1998)

Brad Leithauser is a novelist, poet, and essayist. He lives in Massachusetts.

Kanan Makiya was born in Baghdad and teaches at Brandeis. His books include Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World, and, most recently, The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem. (January 2002)

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. His books include Literature and the Taste of Knowledge and Yeats and Violence

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. His books include Murderer in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and the novel The China Lover. His book Year Zero: A History of 1945 will be published in September 2013.

Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young editor at Doubleday. In 1963 he was a founder of The New York Review and in 1979 cofounder with the late Edmund Wilson of the Library of America. In 2007 he cofounded On Demand Books. Among his many awards are the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle, and the Curtis Benjamin Award given by the American Association of Publishers for enriching the world of books.
 (February 2011)

James Fenton is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, Fenton was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2007 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

William Styron (1925–2006) was the author of several novels, including Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at Princeton. His latest book is The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.

 (November 2012)

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was an American novelist, essayist, and playwright. His many works include the memoirs Point to Point Navigation and Palimpsest, the novels The City and the Pillar, Myra Breckinridge, and Lincoln, and the collection United States: Essays 1952–1992.

Anne Hollander’s books include Seeing Through Clothes, Sex and Suits, and Feeding the Eye. Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting, a companion book for the upcoming exhibition at the National Gallery in London, will be published this spring. (February 2002)

Paul Auster is the author of ten novels, most recently The Book of Illusions. He lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn, NY.

Mahmoud Darwish, a widely admired Palestinian poet, was the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose. He died in August, at age sixty-seven. (September 2008)

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was a poet and one of most prominent figures of the Beat Generation. His epic poem “Howl,” which denounced bourgeois conformity and capitalistic greed, became the subject of a landmark obscenity trial in San Francisco. Known for his celebration of the marginalized and the downtrodden and his opposition to American militarism, Ginsberg drew inspiration from the long lines and anaphoric rhythms of Walt Whitman. His 1981 collection Plutonium Ode won the National Book Award; in 1993 Ginsberg was awarded the medal of Chevalier Des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Günter Grass, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a novelist, poet, playwright, sculptor, and artist. (April 2012)

David Grossman, who lives near Jerusalem, is the author of The Yellow Wind, a report on life in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. His new novel, To the End of the Land, from which the excerpt in this issue is taken, will be published in September by Knopf. Jessica Cohen’s translations include David Grossman’s Her Body Knows and works by Yael Hedaya, Ronit Matalon, Amir Gutfreund, and Tom Segev. (July 2010)

Orhan Pamuk is the author, most recently, of The Museum of Innocence. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and one of the most influential critics of her generation. Her books include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and The Volcano Lover.

Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and former vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, was expelled from the Communist Party of China in 1987. He was granted asylum at the US embassy in Beijing before leaving the country in 1990. He is the 1989 recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and is a professor of physics at the University of Arizona. (November 2011)

Perry Link is retired from Princeton and now teaches at the University of California at Riverside. He translated China’s Charter 08 manifesto, published in these pages, and recently 
co-edited No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo. His latest book, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics, will be published in January 2013.

Alan Ryan teaches at Princeton. His recent works include The Making of Modern Liberalism and On Politics: A History of Political Thought.

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, Author, Author and A Man of Parts. His most recent works of criticism are Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.