Michael Heim is professor of Slavic languages and literature at UCLA. His previous translations include The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera; The Island of Crimea and In Search of Melancholy Baby, by Vassily Aksyonov; The Wedding, by Bertolt Brecht; and works by George Konrad, Gunter Grass, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, and many others. He has received the PEN/American Center West prize for translation, the American Literary Translators Association Prize, National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, and a Fulbright.