Contents

October 22, 2009 • Volume 56, Number 16

LETTERS

Contributors

Steven Weinberg holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics and the National Medal of Science. His latest book for general readers is Lake Views: This World and the Universe.

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.

Adam Kirsch is a Senior Editor at The New Republic and a Contributing Editor to Tablet. His most recent book is Why Trilling Matters.
 (May 2013)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of the collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, a translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy, and a study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. He teaches at Bard College.

Jonathan Spence is Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. Among his books are The Death of Woman Wang, Treason by the Book, The Question of Hu, and The Search for Modern China.

Lawrence Weschler is the Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. Earlier this year he published True to Life: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with David Hockney and an expanded edition of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversationswith Robert Irwin. (October 2009)

Julian Bell is a painter and writer living in Lewes, England. He is the author of What Is Painting? and Mirror of the World: A New History of Art. (June 2013)

Karl Kirchwey is Professor of the Arts at Bryn Mawr and Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. His sixth book of poems, Mount Lebanon, and his translation of Paul Verlaine’s first book (as Poems Under Saturn) appeared in 2011. (December 2012)

Bei Ling, a poet and essayist, is a founder and editor of Qing Xiang, an exile literary journal founded in 1993, now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and published in Chinese. He is also the founder and Executive Director of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an organization of Chinese writers and intellectuals dedicated to the freedom of expression.
 (October 2009)

Hugh Eakin is a senior editor of The New York Review and edits the NYRblog. (January 2013)

Claire Messud’s books include When the World Was Steady and The Emperor’s Children. Her novel The Woman Upstairs will be published in April 2013. (February 2013)

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.

Steven Mithen is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading. His latest book, Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World, was published in November.
 (February 2013)

Joshua Hammer is a former Newsweek bureau chief and correspondent-at-large in Africa and the Middle East.
 (July 2013)

Elizabeth Drew is a regular contributor to The New York Review and the former Washington correspondent of The Atlantic and The New Yorker. She is the author of fourteen books.
 (March 2013)

Norman Rush was raised in Oakland, California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife Elsa, he lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. They now reside in Rockland County, New York. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986, and his first novel, Mating, the recipient of the National Book Award, was published in 1991. Mortals is his second novel. A new novel, Subtle Bodies, will be published in 2013.


Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of The Controversy of Zion, The Strange Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair!
 (April 2013)

Robert Gottlieb is the author of biographies of George Balanchine, Sarah Bernhardt, and Dickens’s children, and the editor of the anthologies Reading Dance and Reading Jazz. (June 2013)

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.

J. Hoberman’s books include Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) and An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War.

Michael Tomasky is Special Correspondent for Newsweek/
The Daily Beast and Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
 (April 2013)

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

Richard Dorment is the art critic of the Daily Telegraph. Among the exhibitions he has organized is “James McNeill Whistler,” seen at the Tate Gallery, London, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 
(June 2013)