David Rieff is a New York-based journalist and author. During the 1990s, he covered conflicts in Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Liberia), the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), and Central Asia. Rieff has written extensively about Iraq, Latin America, and is now covering the war in Ukraine. Among David Rieff's books are: Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, Forgetting: the Irony of Historical Memory, and Swimming in a Sea of Death, a Son's Memoir, David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.