Contents

January 15, 2004 • Volume 51, Number 1

LETTERS

Contributors

Janet Malcolm was born in Prague. She was educated at the High School of Music and Art, in New York, and at the University of Michigan. Along with In the Freud Archives, her books include Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Crime of Sheila McGough, and Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. She lives in New York.

Brian Urquhart is a former Undersecretary-General of the United Nations. His books include Hammarskjöld, A Life in Peace and War, and Ralph Bunche: An American Life. (April 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.

Amos Elon’s most recent book is The Pity of It All: German Jews Before Hitler. He is a Fellow at the Center for Law and Security at NYU. (February 2008)

Alastair Reid is a poet, a prose chronicler, a translator, and a traveler. Born in Scotland, he came to the United States in the early 1950s, began publishing his poems in The New Yorker in 1951, and for the next fifty-odd years was a traveling correspondent for that magazine. Having lived in both Spain and Latin America for long spells, he has been a constant translator of poetry from the Spanish language, in particular the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. He has published more than forty books, among them a wordbook for children, Ounce Dice Trice, with drawings by Ben Shahn. Most recently, in 2008, he published in the U.K. two career-spanning volumes, Outside In: Selected Prose and Inside Out: Selected Poetry and Translations. The substance of Supposing… e gleaned from the many children who have influenced him, to all of whom he owes and dedicates the text.

Tim Judah is the Balkans Correspondent of TheEconomist. He is the author of The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, a new edition of which has just been published. He is also the author of two books on Kosovo and one on the Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila. He has reported on the Balkans, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Iraq, and Sudan for The New York Review.
 (March 2010)

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.


Robin Robertson’s fourth collection of poetry, The Wrecking Light, was published last year, along with his selection of English ­versions of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, The Deleted World.
 (February 2012)

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author, among other books, of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924, and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. His latest book is The Crimean War: A History. (January 2012)

William D. Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale. (October 2011)

John Gregory Dunne’s new novel, Nothing Lost, will be published in May. (January 2004)

John Lanchester is the author of five books including, most recently, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. In 2008 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
 (December 2011)

Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of ten books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars, and, most recently, Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is University Artist and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University.

Thomas Pickering is Co-Chair of the United Nations Association-USA, former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, and former US Ambassador to Russia, Israel, India, Jordan, El Salvador, Nigeria, and the UN. (February 2009)

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of *Animal Liberation*, the editor of *In Defense of Animals: The Second Wav*, and, with Paola Cavalieri, co-editor of *The Great Ape Project*.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of six books, including How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of critical essays mostly from The New York Review of Books. He is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard.

Benjamin is the New Books columnist for Harper’s and the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. He lives in the Netherlands. (June 2010)

Charles Rosen’s recording The Romantic Generation, which contains a performance of Franz Liszt’s Reminiscences of Don Juan, was recently reissued. (February 2012)

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s most recent works are Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.