DEBORAH EISENBERG “simply writes like no one else,” proclaims Elle magazine, and is “one of the most important fiction writers now at work,” according to The New York Times Book Review. She is the author of four short story collections, including Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes. In 2010, her four short-story collections were reprinted as The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Vanity Fair calls the collection “comic, elegant and pitch perfect,” and The New York Timesdescribes it as full of “shimmering stories that possess the power and charm to move us.” Eisenberg is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

ANTONYA NELSON, holder of the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with her husband Robert Boswell, is according to Library Journal, “one of the leading practitioners of the contemporary short story.” She is the author of four novels, includingTalking in Bed and Bound, and seven story collections, includingNothing Right, Female Trouble, and Some Fun. About her most recent collection Funny Once, Booklist writes, “Nelson is scandalously funny, her characters are royally screwed up and wildly inept, and their dire predicaments bust down the doors on the most painful of life’s cruel jokes, from betrayal to divorce, addiction, and old age. Nelson excels at multigenerational chaos …. Each of Nelson’s magnetizing stories generates atomic vibrancy and achieves the psychic mass of a novel.” Recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, Nelson’s books have frequently been New York Times Notable Books, and she was named by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”