Phillip Graham

Phillip Graham is a graduate of the City College of New York program in creative writing. He is the author of The Vanishings (prose poems) and most recently The Art of the Knock (short stories), and has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Washington Post Magazine, and other magazines. He teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Irvin Faust

Irvin Faust is a graduate of the City College of New York and has a doctorate from Columbia University Teachers College. He is the author of six novels, among them The Steagle and Willy Remembers, and two short story collections, Roar Lion Roar and The Year of the Hot Jock. Most recently he was published in an anthology of Jewish-American fiction in Italy.

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Kelly Cherry

Kelly Cherry’s most recent book of fiction, a novel in stories titled My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers, was published in Algonquin Books in 1990. She has published four other novels and three books of poems, most recently Natural Theology (Louisiana State University Press, 1988. In 1989 she received the first Fellowship of Southern Writers Poetry Award, “in recognition of a distinguished body of work.” Louisiana State University Press will publish her first book of nonfiction in 1991.

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Virgilio Piñera

Virgilio Piñera was born in Cuba in 1912. He lived many years in Argentina, where he published his first novel, La carne de René, and in 1956 a volume of brief fantasies, Cuentos frios (Cold Stories). On his return to Cuba, Piñera published a second novel, Pequeñas maniobras, and staged several plays. His short stories have been translated into French and Italian. He died recently in Cuba.

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Herberto Padilla

Herberto Padilla was born in Cuba in 1932. He spent the year 1948 in the United States teaching in Berlitz schools. He returned to Cuba in 1949 and later worked as a journalist in London and Moscow. His books of poetry include Sent Off the Fields (1972), El hombre junto al mar (1978), Por el momemto (1970), and La marca de la soga. A book of his poetry translated by Alastair Reid will be published in 1981 by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Padilla left Cuba in 1980 and now lives in the New York City area.

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Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata is best known in the West for his novels Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and Sound of the Mountain, and for his early short story The Izu Dancer. Kawabata began writing in the early 1920s while he was still a student at Tokyo Imperial University. Soon thereafter he became one of the chief proponents of a new school of Japanese writing, breaking away from the extremes of realism typical of Japanese literature and attempting to develop a new, impressionistic approach. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1958 and died in 1972.

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Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Guillermo Cabrera Infante founded Lunes, the literary supplement to Revolución, which he edited until it was banned in 1961. He was then appointed cultural attaché to the Cuban Embassy in Brussels and promoted to chargé d’affaires, but in 1965, while visiting Cuba to attend his mother’s burial, he resigned from his diplomatic position. His collection of short stories, Así en la paz como en la guerra, has been translated into French, Italian, Polish, Czech, Russian, and Chinese. His novels translated into English include Three Trapped Tigers and View of Dawn in the Tropics. He now lives in London.

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