LARRY BRADLEY’s work has appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times, Paris Review, Poetry, Southwest Review, and previously in New England Review.

SAMUEL BUTLER (1835–1902) was a prolific late Victorian English writer, most widely celebrated as the author of The Way of All Flesh, an autobiographical novel published posthumously, and of the satires titled Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited. He also produced a series of works exploring the far-reaching implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and such provocations as The Authoress of The Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered, and In Part Rearranged.

NORMAN DAVIES is the author of Europe: A History (Oxford University Press, 1996), a number one bestseller in Britain; The Isles (Oxford, 1999), God’s Playground (Columbia University Press, 1982), an award-winning history of Poland; and, most recently, No Simple Victory (Viking Penguin, 2007). Professor Emeritus at London University, he lives in Oxford and Crakow. The essay in this issue of NER will appear in his new book, Vanished Kingdoms (Penguin, 2012).

TIM FITTS lives and works in Philadelphia with his wife and two daughters. His photographs have appeared as cover art for New England Review and American Literary Review. His fiction has appeared in journals such as Gettysburg Review, Xavier Review, and Connecticut Review, among others.

IAN GANASSI’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Octopus, Ploughshares, Sawbuck, Paris Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Fogged Clarity, and The Journal, among many others. His translations from the Aeneid have appeared in NER on numerous occasions. Images from a collaboration with a painter friend can be found at www.thecorpses.com. He lives in New Haven, where he works as a percussionist and teacher.

ADAM GIANNELLI’s poems have appeared in Field, Southwest Review, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, and other journals. He is the editor of High Lonesome: On the Poetry of Charles Wright (Oberlin College Press, 2006).

JANICE GREENWOOD is working to complete her first book of poetry. Her poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.

A. VAN JORDAN is the author of Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (W. W. Norton, 2004), and Quantum Lyrics (W. W. Norton, 2007). He teaches at the University of Michigan.

LAURA KASISCHKE’s most recent collection of poetry, Space, in Chains, was published in 2011 by Copper Canyon Press. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.

PETER LASALLE’s short story collection Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism (2007) is being reissued this spring in paperback by University of Georgia Press. A new novel, Mariposa’s Song, is forthcoming later in 2012 from Texas Tech University Press. His stories have been selected for many anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best of the West, Sports Best Short Stories, Best American Fantasy, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. In 2005 he received the Award for Distinguished Prose from the Antioch Review.

THEODORE LEINWAND is professor of English at the University of Maryland. The most recent essays in his series on poets reading Shakespeare are on Ted Hughes in New England Review and on John Berryman in the Hopkins Review.

JONATHAN LEVY is the author of many plays for adults and children as well as several works of scholarship and criticism. He is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has contributed frequently to NER.

MATTHEW OLZMANN’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize and will be published by Alice James Books in 2013. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Review, Failbetter, and elsewhere.

EILEEN POLLACK’s most recent books are a story collection, In the Mouth (2008), and a novel, Breaking and Entering (2012), both published by Four Way Books. She teaches on the faculty of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

ZANA PREVITI was born and raised in New England. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate at the University of California, Irvine, where she is at work on her first novel. Her fiction has appeared most recently in Hayden’s Ferry Review and the Los Angeles Review.

JACQUES J. RANCOURT holds the 2011–2012 Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, and Columbia, among others. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A founding editor of the online literary journal Devil’s Lake (www.devils-lake.org), he lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

ROBERT B. RAY’s most recent book is Walden x 40: Essays on Thoreau (Indiana University Press, 2011). He has published four other books, including A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton University Press, 1985) and The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (Oxford University Press, 2008). He has also co-led The Vulgar Boatmen, who have released four CDs. Ray’s poem “Don’t Know About You” appeared in the previous issue of NER.

KATYA RENO is a visiting assistant professor of English at Knox College. Her stories and essays have appeared in nthword, 34th Parallel, and Front Porch. She is currently writing a book-length prose poem and a historical novel about silver mining.

CAEDRA SCOTT-FLAHERTY, recipient of the 2008 RRofihe Trophy Award for short fiction, has published stories in Open City, One Story, and Avery Anthology. She received her M.F.A. from New York University, where she studied with E. L. Doctorow and Lydia Davis, and her B.A. from Brown University.

CARRIE SHIPERS’s poems have appeared in Connecticut Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Laurel Review, New England Review, North American Review, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks, Ghost-Writing (Pudding House, 2007) and Rescue Conditions (Slipstream, 2008), and a full-length collection, Ordinary Mourning (ABZ, 2010).

GREGORY SPATZ’s most recent books are the forthcoming novel Inukshuk (Bellevue Literary Press, 2012) and the forthcoming story collection Half as Happy (Engine Books, 2012). His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, Epoch, Santa Monica Review, Kenyon Review, and the New Yorker. A 2012 NEA Literature Fellow and the recipient of a Washington State Book Award, he teaches in and directs the M.F.A. Program for Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University. His website is www.gregoryspatz.com.

MEGAN STAFFEL’s stories have been published in New England Review, Ploughshares, Northwest Review, Seattle Review, and other journals, and collected in Lessons in Another Language (Four Way Books, 2010). She is the author of the novels The Notebook of Lost Things (Soho Press, 1999) and She Wanted Something Else (North Point Press, 1987) and a first collection of stories, A Length of Wire and Other Stories (Pym-Randall Press, 1983). One of her essays appears in the anthology A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft. She teaches in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers.

DAVID YOST, a former Peace Corps Volunteer, has served on development projects in the United States, Mali, and Thailand. His fiction has appeared in more than thirty publications, including Ploughshares, Southern Review, Witness, and the Sun, and he is an editor of the anthology Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011).