Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer based in Prague, who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.
Pale Fire is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote. Together these elements form a narrative in which both fictional authors are central characters. Nabokov wrote Pale Fire in 1960–61, after the success of Lolita had made him financially independent, allowing him to retire from teaching and return to Europe. It was commenced in Nice and completed in Montreux, Switzerland.
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. A self-proclaimed egotist, he coined the same characteristic in his characters' "Beylism".
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was an expatriate Russian and Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland.
Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He published his translation of the Hebrew Bible in 2018.
Daniel Albright was the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard and the editor of Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. He was born and grew up in Chicago, Illinois and completed his undergraduate studies on a full scholarship at Rice in 1967. He received his MPhil in 1969 and PhD in 1970, both from Yale. Albright is also the author of the book Quantum Poetics which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997. He held an NEH fellowship from 1973 to 1974, was a Guggenheim Fellow from 1976 to 1977, and more recently, he was a 2012 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Eugene Perry Link, Jr. is Chancellorial Chair Professor for Innovative Teaching Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages in College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside and Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in modern Chinese literature and Chinese language. Link is a Harvard University alumnus who received his B.A. in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1976. Link has been a Board Member of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) since 2021. CFHK is a US-based non-profit organisation, which presses for the preservation of freedom, democracy, and international law in Hong Kong.
Simon E. Gikandi is a Kenyan Literature Professor and Postcolonial scholar. He is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University. He is perhaps best known for his co-editorship of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He has also done important work on the modern African novel, and two distinguished African novelists: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In 2019 he became the president of the Modern Language Association.
Seth Lerer is an American scholar and Professor of English. He specializes in historical analyses of the English language, and in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
Eugene Webb is Professor Emeritus in the University of Washington Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Webb holds a Ph.D., in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (1965), an M.A. in English Literature from Columbia University (1962) and also a B.A., in Philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles (1960). Webb was a member of the faculties of both the Comparative Literature Department and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, where he served as Associate Director and chaired programs in both Comparative Religion and European Studies (1994). Webb was also the founder of those two programs: Comparative Religion in 1974, and European Studies in 1994. He retired from the University of Washington in 2000, where he now has the title Professor Emeritus of International Studies. Webb has two books on the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett, and has authored the books The Dark Dove: The Sacred and Secular in Modern Literature (1975), Eric Voegelin, Philosopher of History (1981), Philosophers of Consciousness (1988) and The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France (1993), all published by the University of Washington Press. His book World View and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development was published by the University of Missouri Press in 2009, and his In Search of the Triune God: The Christian Paths of East and West was published by the same press in 2014. Webb translated and wrote the introduction to Jean-Michel Oughourlian's, The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession, and Hypnosis,. He also translated a second book by Oughourlian, The Genesis of Desire, published by Michigan State University Press in 2010.
Reginald Gibbons is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic. He is a Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Gibbons has published numerous books, as well as poems, short stories, essays, reviews and art in journals and magazines, has held Guggenheim Foundation and NEA fellowships in poetry and a research fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. For his novel, Sweetbitter, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; for his book of poems, Maybe It Was So, he won the Carl Sandburg Prize. He has won the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, and other honors, among them the inclusion of his work in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His book Creatures of a Day was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for poetry. His other poetry books include Sparrow: New and Selected Poems, Last Lake and Renditions, his eleventh book of poems. His has also published two collections of very short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches and An Orchard in the Street.
Alfred Appel Jr. was an American professor, author and journal editor noted for his investigations into the works of Vladimir Nabokov, modern art, and jazz modernism. He edited The Annotated Lolita, an edition of Nabokov's Lolita. He also authored four other books about Nabokov, literature and music.
Sharon Marcus is an American academic. She is currently the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and French literature and culture, and teaches courses on the 19th-century novel in England and France, particularly in relation to the history of urbanism and architecture; gender and sexuality studies; narrative theory; and 19th-century theater and performance. Marcus has received Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim Fellowship, and ACLS fellowships, and a Gerry Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award at Columbia. She is one of the senior editors of Public Culture, as well as a founding editor and Fiction Review Editor of Public Books.
Victor Henri Brombert is an American scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century literature, the Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University.
Ann Margaret Jefferson, is a British scholar of French literature. She was a fellow and tutor in French at New College, Oxford, from 1987 to 2015, and professor of French at the University of Oxford from 2006 to 2015.
Gaby Wood, Hon. FRSL, is an English journalist, author and literary critic who has written for publications including The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, London Review of Books, Granta, and Vogue. She is the literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, appointed in succession to Ion Trewin and having taken over the post at the conclusion of the prize for 2015.
Stanley Alan Corngold is an American literary scholar. He is an emeritus professor of German and comparative literature at Princeton University.
Robert Martin Adams was an American literary scholar.
Julian Lane Moynahan was an American academic, librarian, literary critic, poet, and novelist. Much of Moynahan's academic work was focussed on D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. He was active as a book reviewer for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983.
