David Denby was born in New York City in 1943, and was educated at Columbia and Stanford. He is the author of Great Books (1996), an acclaimed account of returning to college and reading the Western classics during the curriculum wars; American Sucker (2004), his wrenching memoir of getting caught up in the stock market at the time of the tech bubble and the breakup of his marriage; Snark (2009), a polemic against the spread of nasty low sarcasm as a journalistic style in the Internet age; Do the Movies Have a Future? (2012), a collection of his best movie criticism from The New Yorker; Lit Up (2016), a prequel to Great Books, in which he embeds in tenth-grade English classes at three public schools to see if—and how—teenagers can be turned on to serious reading; and Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer (2025), a biography of four American Jews who emerged after the Second World War and triumphed by means of their own gifts and the new media of television, the long-playing record, mass-market paperbacks, and the like. Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer were free in a way that Jews had never been free before. They led creative and tumultuous lives, made trouble for themselves and others, and changed American culture. Denby is a staff writer and former film critic for The New Yorker, and his reviews and essays have appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, and New York magazine (where he was film critic from 1978 to 1998), among other places. He lives in New York City with his wife, novelist Susan Rieger. He has two sons and two grandsons.
Ross Benjamin is a translator of German-language literature. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his translation of Franz Kafka’s Diaries, and he was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov. His translation of Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. His other translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Joseph Roth’s Job, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and The Director.
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