Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914 to Argentinian parents and raised in Argentina, where as a young man he worked as a secondary-school teacher, university professor, and professional translator. In 1951 he moved to Paris, where he earned his primary living as a translator for UNESCO. He is regarded internationally as a modern master of the short story and his novel Hopscotch is considered a seminal work of the Latin American fiction "boom" of the 1960s. Cortázar's other books in English include Blow-Up and Other Stories, 62: A Model Kit, The Winners, All Fires the Fire, A Manual for Manuel, Cronopios and Famas, A Change of Light, We Love Glenda So Much, A Certain Lucas, Unreasonable Hours, and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. He died in Paris in 1984.

Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of ten books and chapbooks of original poetry, sixteen books of literary translation, and three collections of essays. His most recent books are Where Was I? (prose poems/memoirs), Need I Say More? (essays) and Forbidden Pleasures (new selected poems of Luis Cernuda, translation). He is also the author of a novel, The Mental Traveler, the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges, and from 1999 through 2014 was the founder and editor of The Redwood Coast Review, four-time winner of the California Library Association’s PR Excellence Award. His other awards include a Lambda Literary Award and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his previous translations of Luis Cernuda, Written in Water and Desolation of the Chimera.