David Plante is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Francoeur trilogy-The Family (a finalist for the National Book Award), The Woods, and The Country-and the nonfiction Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three (published by NYRB Classics) and American Ghosts. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Plante teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York and London.

Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden. His books include The Things That Matter, Early Auden and Later Auden, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, published by New York Review Books. He has written for The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and many other publications.