Contents

May 1, 2008 • Volume 55, Number 7

LETTERS

Contributors

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His study of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. His latest book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, was published in February 2013.

Václav Havel (1936–2011) was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. Havel was one of the six signers of the statement “Tibet: The Peace of the Graveyard.”

William Dalrymple was the curator of “Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707–1857,” an exhibition for the Asia Society in New York in 2012. His new book, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–42, is published this month. (June 2013)

Tony Judt (1948–2010) was the founder and director of the Remarque Institute at NYU and the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ill Fares the Land, and The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century, among other books.

Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British critic and literary theorist. Born on the Isle of Man, he taught at University College London, Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard. Adapted from a series of lectures given at Bryn Mawr College, Kermode’s Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction remains one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism.

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.

Michael Chabon is the author of several books, including The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son and most recently, Telegraph Avenue. His essay in the March 7, 2013 issue will appear in different form in The Wes Anderson Collection, to be published by Abrams later this year.

Tim Flannery is Panasonic Professor of Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University in Sydney. His book Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific will be published this month. (November 2012)

Joyce Carol Oates is Visiting Professor in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Her new novel is Daddy Love.


Harold W. Attridge is Dean of Yale Divinity School and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament. His books include Hebrews: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews and Nag Hammadi Codex I: The Jung Codex. (May 2008)

Alison Lurie is a former Professor of English at Cornell. She is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and the editor of The Oxford Book of Fairy Tales. Her most recent novel is Truth and Consequences.


Anthony Lewis, a former columnist for The New York Times, has twice won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.

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.

Caleb Crain is the author of American Sympathy, a study of friendship between men in early American literature. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and n+1. His novel Necessary Errors will be published in 2013.

Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown. His latest book is The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States.

Robert Malley is Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group. He is writing here in his personal capacity. (November 2012)

Hussein Agha is Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and coauthor of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine. (November 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 recent works include 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. His New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 was published in March 2013.