Christian Oster lives in France and is the author of eight novels in addition to a number of pseudonymous detective novels and children's books. Jordan Stump is an associate professor of French at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of Naming and Unnaming (Nebraska 1998) and the translator of numerous books, including ¿ic Chevillard's On the Ceiling (Nebraska 2000) and Claude Simon's Le Jardin des Plantes, for which Stump won the 2001 French-American Foundation Prize.