My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (95 page)

He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull. He said, Not a chance.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

ISAAC BABEL (1894–1940) was born in Odessa, Ukraine (formerly Russia). At the age of twenty-one he went to St. Petersburg, and in 1923 he wrote a number of short stories printed in periodicals. An instant literary success, these formed the nucleus of the
Odessa Stories
. Other stories, scenarios, and plays followed, including
The Red Cavalry
. Unable to conform to the demands for political conformism that were being made on him, however, Babel was arrested in 1939 and was eventually killed by Stalin’s police in 1940.

DAVID BEZMOZGIS was born in Riga, Latvia. In 1980 he immigrated with his parents to Toronto. He received an Honors Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from McGill University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. His writing has appeared in magazines such as
Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Walrus,
and has been anthologized in
Best American Short Stories, 2005
. His collection of stories,
Natasha
, was published to widespread critical acclaim. He lives in Toronto.

HAROLD BRODKEY (1930–1996) was born in Staunton, Illinois, and raised in University City, Missouri, outside St. Louis. After graduating from Harvard University, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories to
The New Yorker
and other magazines. His stories won him two first-place O. Henry Awards. His story collections include
First Love and Other Sorrows, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode,
and
The World Is the Home of Love and Death
. He is also the author of the novels
Women and Angels, The Runaway Soul
, and
Profane Friendship
, and a collection of nonfiction titled
Sea Battles on Dry Land
.

RAYMOND CARVER (1938–1988) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first collection of stories,
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please
(a National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral
(nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and
Where I’m Calling From
in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in August of that year, shortly after completing the poems of
A New Path to the Waterfall
.

EILEEN CHANG (1920–1995), who lived in the United States after fleeing Communist China in 1956, was a prominent fiction writer, essayist, and public intellectual. She is the author of
Romances, The Rice-Sprout Song: A Novel of Modern China
, and
The Rouge of the North
.

ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV (1860–1904) was born in Taganrog, Ukraine. First published in the 1880s, he was a celebrated figure in Russia by the time of his death in 1904, but he remained relatively unknown internationally until the years after World War I, when his works were translated into English. His essays, plays, poetry, and short fiction have been translated into countless languages.

STUART DYBEK is the award-winning author of the story collection
Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, I Sailed with Magellan
, and
The Coast of Chicago
, and the poetry collections
Brass Knuckles
and
Streets in Their Own Ink
. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1973 and is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University. His many awards include a PEN/Malamud Prize, a Lannan Award, and Whiting Writers’ Award.

DEBORAH EISENBERG is the author of four story collections:
Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis
, and
Twilight of the Superheroes
. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel,
The Virgin Suicides
, was published to great acclaim in 1993 and was made into a film directed by Sofia Coppola. His second novel,
Middlesex
, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897–1962) was born in New Albany, Mississippi. His most celebrated novels include
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!
, and
The Unvanquished
. In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His novel
A Fable
won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955, and his
Collected Stories
won the National Book Award in 1951.

RICHARD FORD is the author of the story collections
Rock Springs, Women with Men
, and
A Multitude of Sins
as well as six novels:
A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter, Wildlife, Independence Day
, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and, most recently,
The Lay of the Land
, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award.

DAVID GATES is a staff writer for
Newsweek
and lives in New York. He has been published in
Esquire, GQ, Grand Street, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Best American Short Stories
, and
The O. Henry Prize Stories
. His collection of stories,
The Wonders of the Invisible World
, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

DENIS JOHNSON is the author of
Jesus’ Son
, a critically acclaimed story collection, six novels, most recently
Tree of Smoke
, a collection of poetry, and a book of reportage. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.

JAMES JOYCE (1882–1941) was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. His writings include
Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, Poems Penyeach, Finnegans Wake
, and an early draft of
A Portrait of a Young Man, Stephan Hero
, which was published posthumously.

MIRANDA JULY is a filmmaker, writer, and performance artist. Her work has been presented at sites such as The Kitchen, the Guggenheim Museum, and in two Whitney Biennials. She wrote, directed, and starred in her first feature-length film,
Me and You and Everyone We Know
, which received numerous awards. July’s short fiction has been published in
The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s
, and
Zoetrope
, and her collection of stories,
No One Belongs Here More Than You,
was published in 2007.

MILAN KUNDERA is a Franco-Czech novelist who was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels
The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, and
Immortality
, and the short-story collection
Laughable Loves
—all originally in Czech. His most recent novels,
Slowness, Identity
, and
Ignorance
, as well as his nonfiction works
The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed
, and
The Curtain
, were originally written in French.

BERNARD MALAMUD (1914–1986) wrote eight novels; he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for
The Fixer
, and the National Book Award for
The Magic Barrel
. Born in Brooklyn, he taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850–1893) was born in France in 1850 and fought in the Franco-Prussian War before becoming a protégé of Gustave Flaubert. He published dozens of articles, nearly three hundred short stories, and six novels, the best known of which are
A Woman’s Life, Bel-Ami
, and
Pierre and Jean
.

LORRIE MOORE is the author of the story collections
Birds of America
and
Self-Help
, and the novels
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
And
Anagrams
. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories
, and
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards
. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven story collections—
Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway
; and a volume of selected stories as well as a novel,
Lives of Girls and Women
. She is the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in Literature. Her stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review
, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into numerous languages.

ROBERT MUSIL (1880–1942) was an English short-story writer, novelist, and playwright. His many works include
The Man Without Qualities, Five Women
(also published as
Three Women
),
The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
, and
The Confusions of Young Torless
.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899–1977) was born and raised in St. Petersburg. He left Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power, eventually living in England, Germany, and the United States. He is the author of numerous stories, plays, and novels, most notably
Lolita
, which he wrote in Russian and self-translated into English.

GRACE PALEY (1922–2007) divided her time between New York City and Thetford Hill, Vermont. She is the author of the story collections
The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
, and
Later the Same Day
. Her
Collected Stories
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She also wrote two books of poetry and one volume of poems and prose pieces,
Long Walks and Intimate Talks
. Paley taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, Dartmouth, and the City College of New York. She was the recipient of the 1993 Vermont Award for Excellence in the Arts, the 1992 REA Award for Short Stories, and the 1989 Edith Wharton Award.