Jean Giono (1895–1970) was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Largely self-educated, he started working as a bank clerk at the age of sixteen and reported for military service when World War I broke out. After the success of Hill, which won the Prix Brentano, he left the bank and began to publish prolifically. During World War II his outspoken pacifism led some to accuse him, unjustly, of defeatism and collaboration with the Nazis. After France’s liberation in 1944, he was imprisoned and held without charges. Despite being blacklisted after his release, Giono continued writing and achieved renewed success. He was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954. NYRB Classics publishes Giono’s Hill and Melville.

Alyson Waters has translated several works from the French by Albert Cossery, Louis Aragon, René Belletto, and others. She teaches literary translation in the French department of Yale University and is the managing editor of Yale French Studies. For NYRB Classics, Waters has translated Emmanuel Bove’s HenriDuchemin and His Shadowsand, for The New York Review Children’s Collection, The Tiger Prince by Chen Jiang Hong. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Susan Stewart, the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, is a poet, critic, and translator. A former MacArthur Fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American poets, she is the author of six books of poems, including Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, most recently, Cinder: New and Selected Poems. Her many prose works include On Longing, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, The Poet's Freedom. Her forthcoming book The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture will be available from The University of Chicago Press in Fall 2019.