Contents

December 18, 2008 • Volume 55, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

Joan Didion is the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.

Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently on the press and foreign affairs.

Sarah Kerr, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, lives near Washington, D.C.(December 2008)

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short stories and a play. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. She lives in New York City.

Christian Caryl is a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute and a Contributing Editor at Foreign Policy magazine

Sue Halpern is a scholar in residence at Middlebury. Her most recent book is Can’t Remember What I Forgot: Your Memory, Your Mind, Your Future.
 (January 2012)

Jonathan Raban’s books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Independent. He lives in Seattle.

Ian Jack has edited Granta since 1995. He began his career in journalism on a weekly newspaper in Scotland in the 1960s. Between 1970 and 1986 he worked for the Sunday Times as a reporter, editor, feature writer and foreign correspondent (mainly in the Indian Subcontinent). He was a co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989 and edited that newspaper between 1991 and 1995. His awards in Britain include those for reporter, journalist and editor of the year. A book of his writing about Britain, Before the Oil Ran Out, was published by Secker and Warburg in 1987 and republished by Vintage in 1997. He lives with his family in London.

Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. (July 2011)

Barry Goldensohn is the author of five collections of poems: St. Venus Eve, Uncarving the Block, The Marrano, Dance Music, and, with his wife, Lorrie, East Long Pond. (December 2008)

Michael Tomasky is Special Correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. He is also Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
 (February 2012)

Elizabeth Drew, who lives in Washington, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is the author of fourteen books, including one of the first books on the role of money in modern US politics, from 1983.


Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor, based in Rome, at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, she is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome and The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. She has published a translation of Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture. Her latest books are a biography of Giordano Bruno and a translation of Bruno’s dialogue On the Heroic Frenzies.

Meyer Schapiro, who died in 1996, taught for many years at Columbia. He was one of the most influential art historians of the last century and a contributor to The New York Review. Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks, in which the letters in this issue appear, will be published in January by Getty. (December 2008)

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She delivered a version of the essay in this issue as the Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library this autumn.
 
(January 2012)

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. The article in the Review‘s November 24, 2011 issue is drawn from his new book, Verdi’s Shakespeare: Men of the Theater (Viking).

Alma Guillermoprieto is the author of Dancing with Cuba, a memoir of her experience teaching Cunningham and Graham technique in Havana’s national schools of art.
 (February 2012)

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

James Gleick’s latest book is The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.

Maya Jasanoff teaches British and imperial history at Harvard. Her new book, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, was published in February. (April 2011)

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.

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.

Eliot Weinberger’s most recent book is the essay collection Oranges & Peanuts for Sale.