Nathan Englander & Rivka Galchen

Nathan Englander's story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, became an international bestseller, and earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Englander was selected as one of 20 Writers for the 21st Century by The New Yorker. He was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2004, he was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The Ministry of Special Cases is his first novel. Rivka Galchen was raised in Norman, Oklahoma, went to Princeton, and then received her MD at the Mount Sinai School of medicine. She then received her MFA from Columbia where she now teaches. Her first novel is entitled Atmospheric Disturbances and was named as a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Award, one of Canada's most prestigious literary prizes.