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Duncan Birmingham is a writer, TV producer, and filmmaker. As a writer, his television credits include Maron and Blunt Talk. His short fiction has appeared in the Mystery Tribune,Volume 1 Brooklyn, Joyland, and Maudlin House, among other publications. Birmingham’s debut story collection, The Cult in My Garage, was published in 2021. Most recently he wrote and directed his first feature film, Who Invited Them.

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012) inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. Bradbury was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

Ivan Hernandez can currently be seen on HBO’s And Just Like That… His additional screen credits include Never Have I Ever, Claws, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Scandal, Devious Maids, Law & Order: SVU, The Good Wife, and more. Onstage, he has performed in The Fantasticks, Into the Woods, The Capeman, The Most Happy Fella, Yank!, Zhivago, on Broadway in Chicago and Dear Evan Hansen, and most recently in The Light in the Piazza as part of the Encores! series at City Center in New York City.

Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan and now lives in Tel Aviv. A recipient of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Charles Bronfman Prize, and the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, he is the author of the memoir The Seven Good Years and story collections including Fly Already; The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God; The Nimrod Flipout; and Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. His work has been translated into more than forty-five languages and appeared in TheNew Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Paris Review, and the New York Times, among other publications.

Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current mythological king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US as a visiting professor at Wellesley College, and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.

Michaela Watkins is best known for her leading roles on the series Casual, The Unicorn, and Trophy Wife. Recurring television roles include Tiny Beautiful Things, History of the World: Part II, The Dropout, Catastrophe, Wet Hot American Summer, Search Party, Get Shorty, Big Mouth, Transparent, Veep, The Goldbergs, Enlightened, Married, New Girl, Modern Family, Children’s Hospital, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Key and Peele, The Kroll Show, Drunk History, as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, and as a co-creator, writer, producer, and star of Benched. Her film credits include In a World, Afternoon Delight, Brigsby Bear, The Young Wife, Werewolves Within, Brittany Runs a Marathon, The Way Back, Wanderlust, The House, Sword of Trust, You Hurt My Feelings, and starring opposite Owen Wilson in Paint. She recently wrapped production as the lead role in the Amazon Freevee series Dinner with the Parents, was featured at SXSW with the The Young Wife, and starred in the independent feature Suze, which she also executive produced. Up next, Watkins can be seen in The American Society of Magical Negroes.

Son­dra Sil­ver­ston has trans­lat­ed the work of Israeli fic­tion writ­ers such as Etgar Keret, Ayelet Gun­dar-Goshen, Zeruya Shalev, and Savy­on Liebrecht. Her trans­la­tion of Amos Oz’s Between Friends won the Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award for fic­tion in 2013. Born in the Unit­ed States, she has lived in Israel since 1970.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer is a faculty member in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel.

CREDITS

“A World Without Selfie Sticks” by Etgar Keret, originally published in McSweeney’s. Copyright © 2021 by Etgar Keret, used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

“On the Honeymoon” by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. From When I Was Mortal by Javier Marias (New Directions, 2000). Used by permission of New Directions.

“The Cult in My Garage” by Duncan Birmingham, from The Cult in My Garage (Maudlin House, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Duncan Birmingham. Used by permission of the author.