Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. In 1992, Sorokin’s Collected Stories was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and to demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer. His award-winning works have been translated throughout the world, most recently by Dalkey Archive Press and NYRB Classics. Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin, including Blue Lard (NYRB Classics), Their Four Hearts, and Dispatches from the District Committee (both from Dalkey Archive Press). Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen has published novels (The Netanyahus, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz), a collection of stories (Four New Messages), and a collection of essays (Attention). He was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and his awards include the Matanel Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
