Italo Svevo (1861-1928) was an Italian writer and businessman. He published two novels in the 1890s,
A Life and
As a Man Grows Older (the latter available from NYRB Classics), but after they were dismissed by critics and ignored by the public, he abandoned literature and went to work in his father-in-law's paint business. With the support of James Joyce, he returned to writing and published
Zeno's Conscience in 1923 to international acclaim. Svevo had finished a new book and was at work on another when he was killed in a car crash in 1928.
Frederika Randall (1948-2020) was a writer, reporter, and translator. Among her translations are Ippolito Nievo's
Confessions of an Italian and, for NYRB Classics, Guido Morselli's
Dissipatio H.G. and
The Communist. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Translation and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and with Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize.
Nathaniel Rich is the author of
Losing Earth: A Recent History, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award; the novels
King Zeno,
Odds Against Tomorrow, and
The Mayor's Tongue; and the Little Bookroom title
San Francisco Noir. He is a writer-at-large for the
New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to
The Atlantic,
Harper's, and
The New York Review of Books. He lives in New Orleans.