Jonathan Ames is the author of nine books including Wake Up, Sir!, and You Were Never Really Here!, both published by Pushkin Press.

He also created the hit HBO comedy Bored to Death!, starring Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman, and Blunt Talk!, starring Patrick Stewart.

He has fought in two amateur boxing matches as 'The Herring Wonder'. He lives in Los Angeles.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983. She is the author of the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth, which won the 2016 LA Times Book Prize for Fiction; the essay collection Sidewalks; and Tell Me How It Ends, an essay about the situation faced by children arriving at the US-Mexico border without papers. Lost Children Archive is her first novel written in English.

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Eating Animals. He has also edited a new modern edition of the sacred Jewish Haggadah.

He edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds and his stories have been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions and the New Yorker.

Everything Is Illuminated won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. Jonathan Safran Foer teaches Creative Writing at New York University.

Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number, as well as Look Alive Out There and the bestselling novel, The Clasp. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, New Yorker, Esquire, Vogue, New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine and on NPR. She was the inaugural columnist for the New York Times op-ed "Townies" series, a contributing editor at Interview Magazine and Vanity Fair and a columnist for the Village Voice and New York Observer. She lives in Manhattan.

Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He attended the University of Iowa and the University of California, Irvine. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972. He is the author of the novels The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, as well as the memoir Little Failure.

He was named one of Granta's Best Young American novelists 2007 and has won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He writes regularly for the New Yorker. His new novel, Lake Success, is published by Hamish Hamilton in September 2018.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.