Contents

March 24, 2011 • Volume 58, Number 5

LETTERS

Contributors

Max Rodenbeck is The Economist’s Mideast Correspondent. He lives in Cairo. (May 2013)

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His latest book, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, is now out in paperback.
 (March 2013)

Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was the Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar at Princeton.

Nicholas Lemann is Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.


Frederick Seidel’s new book of poems is Nice Weather. (May 2013)

April Bernard’s most recent collection of poems is Romanticism. A novel, Miss Fuller, will be coming out in the spring.
 (December 2011)

Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia and author of The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. His article in the April 25, 2013 issue will appear as the introduction to Against the Current by Isaiah Berlin, to be published in a new edition by Prince­ton University Press in May 2013.

Perry Link is retired from Princeton and now teaches at the University of California at Riverside. He translated China’s Charter 08 manifesto, published in these pages, and recently 
co-edited No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo. His latest book, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics, will be published in January 2013.

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.

David Kaiser is Chair of the Board of Just Detention International, a health and human rights organization. (October 2012)

Lovisa Stannow is the Executive Director of Just Detention International.
 (October 2012)

Edmund White has written biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. He has also written several novels; the most recent is Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel. He teaches creative writing at Princeton.

Colin McGinn’s books include Shakespeare’s Philosophy, Basic Structures of Reality, and, most recently, Truth by Analysis.
 (March 2013)

Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. (March 2011)

Walter Kaiser was Director of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, in Florence from 1988 to 2002. He is Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Harvard.
 
(March 2013)

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.

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.

Thomas Nagel is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at NYU. His latest book, Mind and Cosmos, was published in September. (December 2012)

Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. His most recent book is The Idea of Justice. (May 2011)