Amy Bloom is the author of four novels: White Houses, Lucky Us, Away, and Love Invents Us; three collections of short stories: Where the God of Love Hangs Out, Come to Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitudes, is a staple of university sociology and biology courses. Bloom is also the author of the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir In Love. She has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Elle, The Atlantic, Slate, and Salon, and her work has been translated into seventeen languages. Bloom recently retired as Wesleyan University’s Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing, while continuing to work as a psychotherapist and a novelist. Her first crime novel, Blunt Instrument, was published in June.
Hope Davis has appeared in the films See You When I See You; The Phoenecian Scheme; Asteroid City; Cat Person; About Schmidt; American Splendor; Synecdoche, New York; Captain America: Civil War; and Rebel in the Rye, among others. On television, Davis’s credits include In Treatment, The Newsroom, The Special Relationship, Allegiance, American Crime, Wayward Pines, For the People, Strange Angel, Love Life, Succession, Perry Mason, Your Honor, Before, CIA, Furious, and the voice of Elizabeth Drinker in Ken Burns’s recent documentary The American Revolution. Her theater credits include Ivanov, Two Shakespearean Actors, Spinning Into Butter, Food Chain, Measure for Measure, God of Carnage, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award, The Red Barn and What We Did Before Our Moth Days by Wallace Shawn.
Michael Imperioli is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Perfume Burned His Eyes and Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos. He is best known for his Emmy-winning performance as Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos. He also wrote five episodes of the show and was co-screenwriter of the film Summer of Sam directed by Spike Lee. Imperioli has appeared in six of Lee’s films and has also acted in films by Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara, Walter Hill, Peter Jackson, and The Hughes Brothers. His recent film and television credits include Memory of a Killer, Between Wars, Song Sung Blue, The Nice Guys, Krapopolis, American Horror Stories, One Night in Miami, The White Lotus, This Fool, and Oh Canada. In 2024, Imperioli made his Broadway debut in Enemy of the People. Michael and his wife, Victoria, founded and were artistic directors of the off-Broadway theater Studio Dante, which was dedicated to new works of theater. They are co-owners of the Upper West Side bar and eatery Scarlet Lounge.
Haruki Murakami is an internationally acclaimed novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo His work, including Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, Men Without Women, First Person Singular, and The City and Its Uncertain Walls, has been translated into more than fifty languages. Among his numerous awards, Murakami was recently honored with the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates. His latest novel, The Tale of Kaho, was published in July.
Rita Wolf was featured in Richard Nelson's The Michaels and What Happened? The Michaels Abroad, at The Public Theater. Additional theater credits include An Ordinary Muslim at New York Theatre Workshop, The American Pilot at Manhattan Theatre Club, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and the World Premiere of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at New York Theatre Workshop and BAM. She appeared in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance with the Transport Group and Out of Time at The Public Theater, both co-productions with The National Asian American Theatre Company, and was a recent Beinecke Fellow at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale while appearing in Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone at Yale Rep. She appeared in Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi's film My Beautiful Laundrette filmed for Channel 4 in the UK, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary and has been re-released in cinemas worldwide.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among other novels. A musical of The Interestings is in development. Wolitzer was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and also writes books for young readers. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a yearlong intensive for emerging novelists.
CREDITS
“Love Is Not a Pie” by Amy Bloom. From Come to Me: Stories (HarperCollins, 1993). First appeared in Room of One’s Own (1990). Copyright © 1990 by Amy Bloom. Used by permission of the author.
“The Year of Spaghetti,” by Haruki Murakami, from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Knopf 2006). Translated by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin. First published in The New Yorker (October 2005). Copyright © 2005 by Haruki Murakami. Used by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.
