by Unknown
SIMON LEYS (1935–2014) was the pen name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was a professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. The Chairman’s New Clothes (1971) was among the first books to expose the abuses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
JESSICA MITFORD (1917–1996), the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, grew up with five sisters and one brother on an isolated Cotswold estate. Rebelling against her family’s hidebound conservatism, Mitford became an outspoken socialist and, with her second cousin and husband-to-be Esmond Romilly, ran away to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Romilly was killed in World War II, and Mitford moved to California, where she married the lawyer and political activist Robert Treuhaft and made a career as a brilliant muckraking journalist.
KENJI MIYAZAWA (1896–1933) was born in Iwate, one of the northernmost prefectures in Japan. In high school, he studied Zen Buddhism and developed a lifelong devotion to the Lotus Sutra. After graduating from an agricultural college, he moved to Tokyo to begin his writing career but had to return home to Iwate to care for a sick sister. He remained there for the rest of his life.
ANDREY PLATONOVICH PLATONOV (1899–1951) was born in central Russia, the son of a railway worker and the eldest of eleven children. He studied engineering and began publishing poems and articles in 1918. Between 1927 and 1946 he wrote dozens of short stories, plays, and novels, many of which remained unpublished during his lifetime.
QIU MIAOJIN (1969–1995) was born in Chuanghua County in western Taiwan. She graduated with a degree in psychology from National Taiwan University and studied clinical psychology at the University of Paris VIII. While in Paris, she directed a thirty-minute film called Ghost Carnival, and not long after, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. Her two novels, Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile, were published posthumously.
GILLIAN ROSE (1947–1995) was a British philosopher and writer. For many years she taught at Sussex University, before accepting a chair in social and political thought at Warwick University. Along with Love’s Work, her major works include The Melancholy Science, Hegel Contra Sociology, Dialectic of Nihilism, The Broken Middle, Judaism and Modernity, Mourning Becomes the Law, and Paradiso.
LEONARDO SCIASCIA (1921–1989) was born in Racalmuto, Sicily. Starting in the 1950s, he established himself in Italy as a novelist and essayist, and also as a controversial commentator on political affairs.
VICTOR SERGE (1890–1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-czarist exiles in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he set out for St. Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and briefly arrested in 1928. Deported to Central Asia in 1933, Serge was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers. He lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–1862) was born and lived the greater part of his life in Concord, Massachusetts. He studied at Harvard, where he became a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson, for whom he later worked as a handyman. On July 4, 1845, he moved into a hut he had constructed on Walden Pond, where he remained until September 6, 1847—a sojourn that inspired his great work Walden, published in 1854. In his later life, Thoreau was active in the abolitionist cause.
CREDITS
Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz; copyright © 1972, 1974 by Eve Babitz
The Human Comedy: Selected Stories by Honoré de Balzac, edited by Peter Brooks, translated by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan M. Stump, translation copyright © 2014 by Carol Cosman
War and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, translated by Mary McCarthy; copyright © 2005 by NYREV, Inc., translation copyright © 1948 by Bollingen, renewed © 1970 by Princeton University Press; used by permission of Princeton University Press
Moderan by David R. Bunch; copyright © 1971 by David R. Bunch
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768–1800 by François-René de Chateaubriand, translated by Alex Andriesse; copyright © 2018 by NYREV, Inc.; translation copyright © 2018 by Alex Andriesse
Zama by Antonio di Benedetto; copyright © 2000 by Adriana Hidalgo editora, S.A. and Luz di Benedetto, translation copyright © 2016 by Esther Allen
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, translated by Michael Hofmann; copyright © 2008 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, translation copyright © 2018 by Michael Hofmann
Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, translated by Anne Carson, translation copyright © 2006 by Anne Carson; used by permission of Anne Carson and Aragi Inc.
The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories by Mavis Gallant; copyright © 2009 by Mavis Gallant; story originally appeared in The New Yorker and was later collected in Transit, copyright © 1995 by Mavis Gallant; used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author
An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman, translated Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler; copyright © 1988 by E.V. Korotkova-Grossman, F. B. Guber, and Elena Fedorovna Kozhichkina, translation and notes copyright © 2013 by Robert Chandler; used by permission of Quercus Editions Ltd. in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations and of the Estate of Vasily Grossman c/o Robin Straus Agency , Inc. in New York acting in conjunction with the Andrew Nurnberg Agency, Ltd. in London
“Billie Holiday” by Elizabeth Hardwick, copyright © 1976 by Elizabeth Hardwick; used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.
Fair Play by Tove Jansson; copyright © 1982 by Tove Jansson/Moomin Characters, translation copyright © 2007 by Thomas Teal and Sort Of Books
Songs of Kabir by Kabir, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, translation copyright © 2011 by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy, translated by John Bátki, translation copyright © 1997 by John Bátki
Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov, copyright © by Editions Verdier, translation copyright © 2006, 2009 by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov
Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh Fermor; copyright © 1958 by Patrick Leigh Fermor; used by permission of John Murray, Ltd. and the Estate of Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays by Simon Leys; copyright © 2011, 2013 by Simon Leys; used by permission of Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Publishing
Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking by Jessica Mitford , copyright © 1970, 1979 by Jessica Mitford
Once and Forever by Kenji Miyazawa, translation copyright © 1993 by John Bester
Soul and Other Stories by Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman; copyright © by Anton Martynenko, translation copyright © 1999 by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Bonnie Huie; copyright © 1994 by Qiu Miaojin, translation copyright © 2017 by Bonnie Huie
Love’s Work by Gillian Rose; copyright © 1995, 2019 by Gillian Rose
The Wine-Dark Sea by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Avril Bardoni, copyright © by the Leonardo Sciascia Estate, translation copyright © 1985 by Avril Bardoni; used by permission of the Italian Literary Agency
Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge, translated by Richard Greeman; copyright © 1939 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, translation copyright © 1981 by Richard Greeman
The Journal: 1837–1861 by Henry David Thoreau, edited by Damion Searls; copyright © 2009 by Damion Searls and NYREV, Inc.
