The Los Angeles Times Book Review calls Lydia Davis "one of the quiet giants of American fiction." The author of several short-story collections, she won the Whiting Award with Break It Down and was nominated for the National Book Award for Varieties of Disturbance. In addition, she is a noted French-to-English translator of novels, biographies, and scholarly writing, including a new edition of Swann's Way by Marcel Proust. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is the first definitive collection of her entire short story oeuvre.

Jonathan Lethem won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his bestselling crime novel Motherless Brooklyn, and his next novel, Fortress of Solitude, was a New York Times bestseller. A writer whose work crosses the border of many literary genres, Lethem has penned a sci-fi short story collection (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye), a comic novel (You Don't Love Me Yet), and has written for the New Yorker, Paris Review, and Harper's. Set in Manhattan, Chronic City is part sci-fi, part comedy, and entirely Lethem.