Alan Lelchuk is the author of six novels, including American Mischief, Miriam at Thirty-Four, Brooklyn Boy, and Playing the Game. He has also co-edited an anthology of Hebrew fiction in English translation, entitled "Eight Great Hebrew Short Novels."He is a co-founder of Steerforth Press, a literary publishing house (in Vermont), where he serves as an editor.He received his BA from Brooklyn College (1960,World Literature), and his graduate degrees from Stanford Univ in English (Ph.D.,1965). He has taught at Brandeis, Amherst College, and since 1985 at Dartmouth. (He spent a Fulbright year at Haifa University,1986-87, as writer in residence.) He has also been a Guggenheim Fellow in… Fiction.For Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, he has taught�a course in contemporary Jewish fiction. Since WWII, Jewish writers have not only come into their own, but have dominated the landscape of world fiction, as the course tries to demonstrate. Readings include Isaac Babel, I.B.Singer, Ida Fink, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Teodor Borowski, A.B.Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Bernard Malamud, Nadine Gordimer, and others.During the 1999 - 2000 academic year, Professor Lelchuk was the Otto Salgo Chair in American Studies at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.
Gershon Shaked is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to many works in Hebrew, his English language publications include *The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers*, *Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist*, and* Eight Great Hebrew Short Novels* (coedited with Alan Lelchuk). Shaked is the recipient of the Israel Prize and the Bialik Prize.