Friederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher, essayist, and critic whose writings about morality, truth, language, aesthetics, and nihilism are considered cornerstones of Western philosophy. Damion Searls has translated many classic twentieth-century writers, including Proust, Rilke, Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, Hans Keilson, and Herman Hesse. For NYRB Classics, he edited Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837-1861, translated Nescio's Amsterdam Stories, and Robert Walser's A Schoolboy's Diary. He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Cullman Center fellowships and is currently writing a book about Hermann Rorschach and the cultural history of the Rorschach test. Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures and director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State. His work has appeared in both scholarly journals and venues such as Harper's Magazine, Bookforum, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of three books, and he recently collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann on The Kraus Project. Chad Wellmon is the author of Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom and Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. He is Associate Professor of German Studies at the Institute for Advance Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is also editor of the Infernal Machine.