Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born in Prague. Widely esteemed as one of the twentieth century’s most important writers, he is the author of the novels The Trial and The Castle.

Joachim Neugroschel (1938–2011) was the translator of over two hundred books, including works by Marcel Proust, Elias Canetti, and Thomas Mann. Over the course of his career, he received many awards, including the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Ling Ma is author of the novel Severance and the story collection Bliss Montage. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize in Literature, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and VQR. She lives in Chicago.