Nathan Englander was born in New York in 1970. His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Englander’s story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. He lives in New York City.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in LA. Everywhere else he is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. He writes the award-winning Tommywood column (www.tommywood.com) that appears in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. Recently he served as American Film and TV editor of the 2nd Edition of The Encyclopedia Judaica.

Nathan Englander is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,, which earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic,and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Storiesand The O. Henry Prize Stories.

David L. Ulin is the book critic for the Los Angeles Times and, from 2005-2010, was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. His essays and criticism have appeared in many publications.