Jean Stafford (1915-1979) was a novelist and short-story writer. She published the novels Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion, and The Catherine Wheel; more than forty short stories; and A Mother in History, a journalistic portrait of Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. Her Collected Stories won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970.
Rumaan Alam is the author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and elsewhere.