Ann Harada is best known for playing Christmas Eve in the Broadway and London productions of Avenue Q and stepsister Charlotte in Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Additional Broadway credits include Into the Woods, 9 to 5, the revival of Les Misérables, Seussical, and M. Butterfly. Film and television credits include Sisters, Admission, Hope Springs, The Art of Getting By, Feel, The Jim Gaffigan Show, Happiness, Smash, Lipstick Jungle, 30 Rock, Blue Bloods, The Flight Attendant, Schmigadoon!, Disenchanted, and Jerry and Marge Go Large.
Fred Hechinger most recently appeared as Emperor Caracalla in the blockbuster film Gladiator II, Dmitri Kravinoff in Kraven the Hunter, and Harper in Nickel Boys. He also starred as Daniel Markowitz in the film Thelma. Hechinger made his film debut in Eighth Grade, and subsequently has gone on to be seen in Alex Strangelove, The Woman in the Window, Fear Street, News of the World, The Underground Railroad, Italian Studies, The White Lotus,The Pale Blue Eye, Butcher's Crossing, Pam & Tommy, and Hell of a Summer. Hechinger attended the Thalia Kids’ Book Club Camp at Symphony Space for six years and came back as a counselor for one summer.
Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Wednesday’s Child; The Book of Goose; Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; The Vagrants; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
William Maxwell (1908 – 2000) was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois. He studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and after earning a master's at Harvard, returned there to teach freshman composition before turning to writing. He published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For 40 years, he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for So Long, See You Tomorrow, the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Liev Schreiber earned five Golden Globe nominations and three Emmy nominations for his starring role on Showtime’s Ray Donovan. Most recently, he starred opposite Nicole Kidman in Netflix’s The Perfect Couple. His other screen credits include the Scream trilogy, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Manchurian Candidate, Spotlight, Isle of Dogs, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The French Dispatch, Across the River and Into the Trees, Asteroid City, Ray Donovan: The Movie, which he also co-wrote, A Rainy Day in New York, Don’t Look Up, A Small Light, and Golda. On stage, he starred in the 2024 Broadway revival of Doubt, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award, Glengarry Glen Ross, for which he won a Tony Award, A View from the Bridge (Drama Desk Award), Talk Radio, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Cymbeline (Obie Award), Hamlet, Henry V, and Macbeth. Upcoming projects include Caught Stealing and The Guns of Christmas Past.
Deborah Treisman has been the Fiction Editor at The New Yorker since 2003. She joined the magazine as Deputy Fiction Editor in 1997. She is the host of the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and the editor of the anthologies 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925–2025. In 2012, Treisman received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Contribution to Fiction.
E. B. White (1899 – 1985), the author of the beloved classics Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, was born in Mount Vernon, New York. White also was a contributing editor to The New Yorker magazine and co-author of The Elements of Style.
Tobias Wolff is the author of the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, and the short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Night in Question, and Our Story Begins, which won The Story Prize for 2008. Additional honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award—both for excellence in the short story—the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, three O. Henry Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Medal of Arts. He has also been the editor of The Best American Short Stories, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, and A Doctor's Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and other magazines and literary journals.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.
CREDITS
“Life Cycle of a Literary Genius,” by E. B. White, first published in The New Yorker (October 16, 1926). Collected in A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025 (Knopf, 2025). Copyright © 1926 by The Estate of E. B. White. Used by permission of Creative Artists Agency and The Estate of E. B. White.
“Love,” by William Maxwell, first published in The New Yorker (November 6, 1983). Collected in All The Days and Nights: The Collected Stories of William Maxwell (Vintage, 2013) and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025 (Knopf, 2025). Copyright © 1983 by William Maxwell Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.
“Bullet in the Brain,” by Tobias Wolff, first published in The New Yorker (September 17, 1995). Collected in The Night in Question (Knopf, 1996) and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025 (Knopf, 2025). Copyright © 1995 by Tobias Wolff. Used by permission of Creative Artists Agency and the author.
“All Will Be Well,” by Yiyun Li, first published in The New Yorker (March 4, 2019). Collected in Wednesday’s Child (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025 (Knopf, 2025). Copyright © 2019 by Yiyun Li. Adapted version of the text used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.
