Nicholson Baker is the author of eight novels—The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, The Everlasting Story of Nory, A Box of Matches, Checkpoint, and The Anthologist—and four works of nonfiction—U and I, The Size of Thoughts, Double Fold, and Human Smoke. He is the co-author, with his wife Margaret Brentano, of The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper. In 1999 he established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries. He is the recipient of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle award for Double Fold.

David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award.