Slippery Roads and Fancy Shorts

Alfred Birnbaum was born in the U.S. in 1955 and raised in Japan from age five. He studied at Waseda University, Tokyo, under a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship, and has been a freelance literary and cultural translator since 1980. His translations include Haruki Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase, Hardboiled Wonderland,The End of the World, and other works; Miyabe Miyuki's All She Was Worth; and Natsuki Ikezawa's A Burden of Flowers. He also compiled the short story anthology Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese Fiction.

Mike Doyle has appeared on screen in New Amsterdam, City on a Hill, The Romanoffs, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Accidental Wolf, Narcos: Mexico, Jersey Boys, The Invitation, and Green Lantern, among others. His stage credits include The New Century at Lincoln Center and Betrayed with the Culture Project. Doyle wrote and directed the feature film Almost Love starring Kate Walsh, Patricia Clarkson, and Scott Evans. He is currently working on his next film, Passing Through.

Aasif Mandvi is Peabody Award–winning actor, writer, and producer. He can currently be seen starring on Evil, This Way Up, and Would I Lie to You, for which he served as host and Executive Producer. Mandvi was a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and a writer, producer, and co-star on the HBO series The Brink. His film credits include Mother’s Day, Million Dollar Arm, The Internship, The Dictator, Spider-Man 2, The Proposal, The LastAir-Bender, Ghost Town, and most recently, Crush. Mandvi also co-wrote and starred in the film Today’s Special. Additional TV credits include A Series of Unfortunate Events, Blue Bloods, Younger, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He also co-created and starred in the Peabody Award–winning webseries Halal in the Family. On Broadway he starred in The National Theatre’s production of Oklahoma and the Lincoln Center premiere of Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Disgraced. He was also the recipient of the OBIE award for his solo show Sakina’s Restaurant at the American Place Theatre. In 2014 Mandvi released his first book, No Land’s Man, a collection of humorous and personal stories published by Chronicle Books.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of the short story collections The Souvenir Museum, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, and Thunderstruck, winner of the Story Prize, and the novels The Giant’s House, a National Book Award finalist; Niagara Falls All Over Again, winner of the PEN New England Award; An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination; and Bowlaway. She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. McCracken currently holds the James A. Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas, Austin. Her recent novel, The Hero of this Book, was published in October 2022.

Haruki Murakami is the author of numerous best-selling novels, short story collections, and works of nonfiction, including The Elephant Vanishes, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Underground, Kafka on the Shore, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, 1Q84, Men Without Women, and Killing Commendatore. His stories have appeared in English in The New Yorker, Granta, and numerous other publications. He has been honored with the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, among others. Murakami’s work has been translated into 50 languages.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer is a faculty member in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel.

CREDITS

“Lederhosen” by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum. Collected in The Elephant Vanishes (Knopf, 1993). Story copyright © 1993 by Haruki Murakami. Translation copyright © 1993 by Alfred Birnbaum. Used by permission of ICM Partners.

“Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark” by Elizabeth McCracken, from Souvenir Museum (Ecco, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth McCracken. Used by permission of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.