Contents

December 20, 2012 • Volume 59, Number 20

LETTERS

Contributors

Zoë Heller is the author of Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, and The Believers. (June 2013)

Leszek Kołakowski was professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw until March 1968 when he was formally expelled for political reasons. He was later a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He was the author of several books, including Main Currents in Marxism. The article in this issue will appear in the collection of essays Is God Happy?, to be published in February by Basic Books. He died in 2009. (December 2012)

Andrew Butterfield is President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts. (June 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)

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.

Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His most recent book is Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD, published in September. (December 2012)

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)

Charles Glass, former ABC News chief Middle East correspondent, is the author of Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation and Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria.
 (December 2012)

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) was Professor of Philosophy and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at NYU. His books include Is Democracy Possible Here?, Justice in Robes, Freedom’s Law, and Justice for Hedgehogs. He was the 2007 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize for “his pioneering scholarly work” of “worldwide impact” and he was recently awarded the Balzan Prize for his “fundamental contributions to Jurisprudence.”


Geoffrey O’Brien is Editor in Chief of the Library of America. His recent works include Early Autumn and The Fall of the House of Walworth. His new book Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film 2002–2012 will be published in 2013.


Ian Johnson writes from Beijing and Berlin. His book on grassroots civil society, Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China, has recently been published in Chinese. 
(April 2013)

Janet Malcolm was born in Prague. She was educated at the High School of Music and Art, in New York, and at the University of Michigan. Along with In the Freud Archives, her books include Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Crime of Sheila McGough, and Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. She wrote about the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the mother of Michelle, in her book Iphigenia in Forest Hills, just out in paperback. Her collection Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers will be published in the spring of 2013.


She lives in New York.

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.

J. M. Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale. His books include Thinking the Twentieth Century, a book of conversations with Tony Judt, and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, both of which were recently published in paperback.
 (March 2013)

Gabriel Winslow-Yost is Assistant Editor at The New York Review. (December 2012)

G.W. Bowersock is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His latest book, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, was published in April. (May 2013)

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

Charles Baxter is the Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. His latest book, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, was published in paperback in February. (December 2012)

Mark Danner is the author, most recently, of Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. He is Chancellor’s Professor of English, Journalism and Politics at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities at Bard College and is currently teaching at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. His book Torture and the Forever War will be published in the spring of 2013. His writing and other work can be found at markdanner.com.

Charles Rosen is a pianist and music critic. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel The Accursed. She is Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Arts and the Humanities at Princeton.