Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. He came to early prominence in the 1960s for such experimental plays as Kaspar and rapidly established himself as one of the most respected German-language writers of his generation, producing fiction, translations, memoirs, screenplays, and essays. Among his best-known novels are The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Repetition, and My Year in the No-Man's Bay. He has directed adaptions of his novels The Left-Handed Woman and Absence and collaborated with filmmaker Wim Wenders on four films, including Wings of Desire. In addition to Short Letter, Long Farewell, NYRB Classics has also published Handke's novel Slow Homecoming. Handke won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. Greil Marcus is the author of The Shape of Things to Come- Prophecy and the American Voice, Lipstick Traces, and other books; with Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, forthcoming in 2009. In recent years he has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, the New School University, and the University of Minnesota. He was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley. Ralph Manheim (1907-1992) translated G nter Grass, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Hermann Hesse, and Martin Heidegger, along with many other German and French authors.