Contents

July 17, 2008 • Volume 55, Number 12

LETTERS

Contributors

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian of China. Until 1998 he was East Asia editor of The Times of London. (October 2011)

Sanford Schwartz is the author of Christen Købke and 
William Nicholson. (December 2011)

Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.

Russell Baker is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His books include The Good Times, Growing Up, and Looking Back.

Zadie Smith is the author of three novels, most recently On Beauty, and the editor of the short-story anthology The Book of Other People.

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

Hilary Mantel is an English novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her novel, Wolf Hall, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

Jonathan Freedland is an editorial-page columnist for The Guardian. He is a past winner of the David Watt Prize for Journalism. (February 2012)

Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard and general editor of The Norton Shakespeare. His book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern received the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
 (March 2012)

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)

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

Claire Messud’s most recent novel is The Emperor’s Children. (December 2011)

Madison Smartt Bell is Professor of English and Director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College. His new book, DevilA?s Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest, is forthcoming in November. (October 2009)

Linda Colley is Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton. Her latest book is The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History. (July 2008)

Per Petterson is the author of five novels, including Out Stealing Horses. The excerpt in this issue is drawn from To Siberia, which will be published by Graywolf Press in October. (July 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.

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)

Janos Kis, who teaches philosophy at Central European University in Budapest, was a leading member of the Hungarian democratic opposition to the Communist regime and co-founder and first chairman of Hungary’s liberal party. His latest book is Politics as a Moral Problem, which will be published in November. (July 2008)

Perry Link is Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, specializing in modern Chinese literature and Chinese language. He is currently Chancellorial Chair for Innovation in Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California, Riverside. Along with Andrew J. Nathan, Link translated the Tiananmen Papers, which detailed the governmental response to the 1989 democracy protests. He is editing a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo that will appear in 2012 from Harvard University Press.

Jeremy Waldron is University Professor at New York University School of Law and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. His most recent book is Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House.
 (January 2012)

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.

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

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)

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

Jeffrey Eugenides grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and attended Brown University. He is the author of two novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. He lives in Berlin, Germany, with his wife.

Dave Eggers is the editor of McSweeney’s and the author of three books: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; You Shall Know Our Velocity, a novel; and Visitants, a collection of short stories. He lives in California.

Ursula K. Le Guin has published twenty-one novels as well as volumes of short stories, poems, essays, and works for children. Among her novels are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, both winners of the Nebula and Hugo awards.

Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

Dyson’s books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999), and A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2010). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard. His latest book is Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
 (November 2011)

Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism, and history. Her award-winning studies of mythology and fairy tales include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, From the Beast to the Blonde, and No Go the Bogeyman. In 2006 she published Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media, a study of ghosts, phantasms, and technology. Her most recent work of fiction is the novel The Leto Bundle. A Fellow of the British Academy, she is also Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex.

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.