Contributors

Gideon Bachmann is an American film critic who since 1961 has been living in Europe, where his documentary series Movies on Movies is popular on television. He is at work on the English version of a book titled Craft and Craftiness of the Movies, which he describes as a primer for students from fourteen to seventy-five.

Herb Caen was born in Sacramento, but "wasn't really born" until he went to San Francisco, where his daily column for the Chronicle has become an institution.

Peter Handke is the author of numerous novels and plays and the memoir A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. An Austrian, he is one of Europe's major writers. The piece in this issue is taken from journals kept in Paris from 1975 to 1977, and will be published this spring by Farrar, Straus & Giroux under the title The Weight of the World.

Janet Kauffman is a poet and short story writer who grew up on a tobacco farm in Pennsylvania. She now runs her own farm in Michigan, and her first collection of short stories, Places in the World a Woman Could Walk, is out this month from Knopf.

Murray Kempton is one of America's most tough-minded political thinkers. He writes a column for Newsday and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is author of Part of Our Time, America Comes of Middle Age, and The Briar Patch.

Dominique Lapierre's peripatetic years as a journalist for Paris Match inspired him to investigate the most shattering events in contemporary history in such books as Is Paris Burning?, Freedom at Midnight, and 0 Jerusalem! (all written with Larry Collins). He is presently at work on a book about Calcutta.

Carter Ratcliff has written books about such diverse artists as John Singer Sargent and Andy Warhol. His art criticism appears in Art in America and Artforum, among other publications.

Lawrence Rout was the Wall Street Journal's correspondent in Mexico and returned to New York last year to cover international banking. He is now a news editor in the Journal's New York office.

Gregory Sandow reviews new music for the Village Voice and mainstream classics for the Wall Street Journal, Saturday Review, and Opera News. He is "an advocate of the classics when downtown, and of the avant-garde when uptown."

Peter Schjeldahl is a poet, essayist, and art critic.

Mimi Sheraton was food critic and restaurant critic for the New York Times for the past seven years, an occupation that permitted her to eat dinner at home exactly five times in 1982. She is author of Mimi Sheraton's New York Times Guide to New York Restaurants, From My Mother's Kitchen, and The German Cookbook (among others), and is currently working with Alan King on Is Salami and Eggs Better Than Sex? She lives in Greenwich Village with her husband.

Carol Squiers has curated contemporary photography shows in Vienna and Milan and at P.S. 1 in New York. Her criticism has appeared in the Village Voice and Artforum.

Geoffrey Stokes writes about politics, sports, and music for the Village Voice, and cheerfully admits to being a "full-time dilettante." In his soon-to-be-published book Pinstripe Pandemonium, he follows the New York Yankees through their disappointing 1983 season.

Lewis Thomas is chancellor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. His essays, on topics ranging from punctuation to embryology, have won him a National Book Award and an American Book Award. Dr. Thomas's third and most recent collection of essays is Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

Gudora Welty published her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941, and went on to become one of our most distinguished writers of fiction and criticism. Her other works include The Optimist's Da4ughter, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, The Robber Bridegroom, and Losing Battles. Her new book of autobiographical essays, One Writer's Beginnings, is due out this February from Harvard University Press.