Pulitzer Prize winner JUNOT DIAZ's first book, Drown, established him as a major new writer with the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet ( Newsweek). His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year by Time magazine and spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, establishing itself with more than a million copies in print as a modern classic. In addition to the Pulitzer, Diaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award.

HEIDI PITLOR is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor for The Best American Short Storiessince 2007. She is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage.