Contributors

Ann Arensberg’s first novel, Sister Wolf, won an American Book Award in 1981. Unlike the heroine of the story in this issue, the author believes in ghosts and thinks it is unfair that she has never been allowed to see one.

John Ashbery’s collections of poetry, among them Some Trees, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror Houseboat Days, and As We Know, have won him a National Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Manhattan, and is an art critic for Newsweek.

Peter Biskind, a displaced New Yorker enduring exile in Washington, D.C., is editor of American Film. His book on film and ideology in the ’50s, Seeing Is Believing, has just been published.

Joseph Brodsky’s books of poetry include A Part of Speech. The Russian emigre teaches literature at Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College. Less Than One, a collection of essays, is due shortly.

Joan Juliet Buck, author of The Only Place to Be, has attended “at least fifteen’’ international film festivals. For the piece in this issue, she went 8,735 feet above sea level. She is at work on her second novel.

Alexander Cockburn writes fast and furious for the Village Voice, The New York Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal.

Richard Condon is the author of the new 71 Trembling upon Rome and nineteen other novels. He is a fairly recent and “very boastful’’ resident of Dallas, Texas.

Gary Giddins, author of Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz & American Pop, claims he can play blues piano in the key of C.

C. David Heymann is the author of Ezra Pound: The Last Rower and American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert Lowell.

Arthur Miller and Inge Morath have collaborated on a number of book projects, including In Russia and In the Country, which is being reissued. The newest spate of revivals of Miller’s work in this country includes Up from Paradise, Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman, which will be in New York in the spring, and After the Fall with Frank Langella.

Carter Ratcliff is an art critic whose work appears in Art in America, among other publications. His new book, Andy Warhol, has just been published.

Mark Stevens is an art critic for Newsweek. His first novel, Summer in the City, will be out in the spring.

Matthew Stevenson is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn.

Edmund White is a fellow and former executive director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. His novels are Forgetting Flena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and A Boy's Own Story, and he is also the author of the travel epic States of Desire.

Jeanne Ballot Winham, for six years secretary to Frank Crowninshield and later an executive editor of Vanity Fair, is still with Conde Nast. After a forty-seven-year hiatus at Vogue, she is once more on the right path as a regular visitor in our offices.

James Wolcott’s column will be appearing regularly in Vanity Fair. He has written for many publications on books, popular culture, movies, and sports, and is rooting for gymnasts Julianne McNamara and Natalia Yurchenko in the ’84 Olympics.