Various Authors (Author)
Gretchen Reydams-Schils is an award-winning professor of classics, philosophy, and theology at the University of Notre Dame. She is a specialist in Plato and the traditions of Platonism and Stoicism, is the author of numerous books, and runs the Notre Dame Workshop on Ancient Philosophy.

Thomas Mann (Contributor)
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is widely regarded as the greatest German novelist of the twentieth century. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, was a huge success and led to a Nobel Prize in Literature. However, when the Nazis came to power, his works were blacklisted and burned and Mann was stripped of his citizenship. He spent the latter part of his life in exile in the United States and Switzerland. His other major novels include The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus and Joseph and His Brothers.

E.T.A. Hoffmann (Contributor)
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman (1776-1822) was one of the most important writers of German Romanticism. His novella The Sandman inspired Delibes' ballet Coppelia, whilst The Nutcracker and the Mouseking became the basis of Tchaikovsky's much-loved Christmas ballet.

Martin Suter (Contributor)
Martin Suter is a novelist, screenwriter, and newspaper columnist born in Zurich, Switzerland. He has written a dozen novels, many of them bestsellers in Europe and translated into thirty-two languages, including The Last Weynfeldt, as well as Allmen and the Dragonflies and its sequel Allmen and the Pink Diamond. Suter lives with his family in Zurich.

Peter Stamm (Contributor)
Peter Stamm is the Swiss author of eleven novels, along with several short story collections, plays, and radio dramas. Several of his works have been translated into English. He has received several German language literary prizes, and was short-listed for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for his full body of work.