Barney Rosset

Barney Rosset was the founder of both the Evergreen Review and Grove Press. Among the hundreds of acclaimed writers he published are Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, Kenzaburō Ōe, Pablo Neruda, and Susan Sontag. His publications of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer are landmark events in the history of the First Amendment. Rosset’s memoir Rosset: My Life in Publishing, and How I Fought Censorship is available from OR Books.

William Bryant

William Bryant has been traveling the Middle East for almost a decade, since just before the Gulf War. He has done a stint for the Saudi Navy, worked in the petrochemical industry, and shown the same propensity as his inspiration T.E. Lawrence for Plunging Crudely Among Crude Men. Ross will be his first published novel.

Mia Yun

Mia Yun was born and lived in Korea until she came to the United States as a graduate student. She received an MFA in creative writing from City College of New York. House of the Winds is her first novel and was published in October 1998 by Interlink Books.

Of the book, the Kirkus Reviews said, "A Korean-American writer's first novel records the progress of its unnamed narrator's girlhood in Seoul in the early 1960s. Her doting mother (long known as 'Young Wife') is a bewitching repository of fanciful tales festooned with magical-realist drollery: birds cry rather than sing, and butterflies house the souls of children who have died in their sleep. Subtly linked episodes are dominated by such vivid figures as Young Wife's own mother, an 'infamous hypochondriac' and inexhaustible fount of stories; infrequent visits from 'the stranger who was said to be my father'; an irreverent peddler (the Falstaffian 'Pumpkin Wife'); a house haunted by weeping women ghosts; and the narrator's saddened farewells to her parents and siblings on embarkation to America. A lovely, lyrical coming-of-age tale, graced by judiciously blended notes of humor and melancholy. A superlative debut."

David Sutherland

David Sutherland's work has been published in a number of literary journals, magazines and reviews with recent pieces appearing in The American Literary Review, The Hollins Critic, Talking River Review and others.

Rachel King

Rachel King was born in Surrey in 1953. She now lives in the West Country with her partner, dog and her collection of modern jazz, Indian classical music and the poetry of Rumi. Alba is her first novel. British critic Lesley Glaister called Alba “Bizarrely beautiful and frightening intense. The portrayal of sexuality is particularly strange and disturbing. Rachel King is undoubtedly a startlingly talented new writer.”

Maurice Girodias

Maurice Girodias founded the Olympia Press in Paris in 1953. His father Jack Kahane had published such luminaries as Henry Miller, Anais Nin, James Joyce, Frank Harris and Lawrence Durrell under his own Obelisk imprint in the 1930's. After World War II, Girodias began to accumulate a crew of American and British writers living in Paris to produce what became know as "dirty books" under his Traveller's Companion series. These small green paperbacks were written in English and sold mainly to American servicemen and tourists who helped to "distribute" them throughout the world. But mixed in with the erotic titles were works which were to become some of the most important literature in the poat-war era. J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Pauline Reage's Story of O, William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Terry Southern's Candy, works by Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet and Georges Bataille rounded out the Olympia list. Girodias was also the first to publish Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. The two had a long running feud over the book, some of which was played out in the pages of Evergreen. Girodias' article, Lolita, Nabokov and I was first published in Evergreen in September of 1965 (#37). Nabokov replied in Evergreen #45 (1967) in his article Lolita and Mr. Girodias. Girodias had the last word in his Letter to the Editor, June 1967 (#47). After the censorship barriers were broken in the U.S. and in Europe, Griodias moved Olympia to New York City where it remained until its demise in 1973. Maurice Girodias died in 1990.

Ghislaine Dunant

Ghislaine Dunant was born in Paris. Brazen was her first novel, published by Gallimard as L'Impudeur in France. Since that time Dunant has published La Lettre Oubliee (The Forgotten Letter) and is presently working on her third novel. Brazen is the story of a sculptor who is seriously burned in an explosion in his loft, and, while hospitalized, meets Sabine, the nurse who dresses his wounds and who becomes the center of his obsessive sexual passion.

Jason Meagher

Jason Meagher was the managing editor of Evergreen Review in it's first iteration in web publishing. He is also involved in the musical group the No-Neck Blues Band and is the co-editor and publisher of the Wandering Archive which published Wandering Archive One, an anthology of free-psychedelic writing.

John Fergus Ryan

John Fergus Ryan is the author of three novels, The Redneck Bride, The Little Brothers of St. Mortimer, and Watching. Billy Bob Thorton (Slingblade) recently finished production of a film version of his book The Redneck Bride, starring Antonio Banderas. Ryan has lived in Memphis, Tennessee for over 40 years. His next novel is titled The Dairy of Ronda Springtime, a comic story of the making of a Country & Western star.

Michael O'Donoghue

Eric Bach

Frances Moore Lappé

Frances Moore Lappé is the author of twelve books, including the international best-seller Diet for a Small Planet, and co-director of the Center for Living Democracy in Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1975, she and Joseph Collins founded the Oakland-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), www.foodfirst.org.

Peter Rosset

Peter Rosset is the executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, www.foodfirst.org. He also teaches at Stanford University. Dr. Rosset's many books include A Cautionary Tale: Failed U.S. Development Policy in Central America, The Greening of the Revolution: Cuba's Experiment with Organic Agriculture, and Agroecology.

Joseph Collins

Dr. Joseph Collins's many books include Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, and Aid as Obstacle: Twenty Questions About Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry (both with Frances Moore Lappé), as well as No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba and Chile's Free-Market Miracle: A Second Look. In 1975 he co-founded the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), www.foodfirst.org. An author, lecturer, and consultant on international development issues, he makes his home in Santa Cruz, California.

Kenzaburō Ōe

Kenzaburō Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. He was born on the Japanese island of Shikoku in 1935. He is regarded as one of the most important post World War II Japanese authors and has been called the first truly modern Japanese author. An excerpt from Ōe's novel Arise Ye Young Men, title inspired by William Blake, recently appeared in The New Yorker.

Luk Van Haute

Luk Van Haute is the translator of 17 & J. He lived in Japan for six years. While there he served a fellowship at the University of Tokyo for two years, researching contemporary Japanese literature, with a focus on Kenzaburō Ōe.

Akbar Del Piombo

Akbar Del Piombo was the pen-name of Norman Rubington. An American painter in Paris on the GI Bill, Rubington was a major part of Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press, authoring eight books for the press. He also co-translated Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans lé Metro into English with Eric Kahane and illustrated The Olympia Reader, published by Grove Press and then by Foxrock Books, from which this piece is taken.