Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) was a genre-redefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic, and translator. Throughout the 1960s Manchette supported himself with various jobs writing television scripts, screenplays, young-adult books, and film novelizations. In 1971 he published his first novel, a collaboration with Jean-Pierre Bastid, and went on to produce ten subsequent works over the course of the next two decades and establishing a new genre of French novel, the néo-polar (distinguished from traditional detective novel, or polar, by its political engagement and social radicalism). NYRB Classics also publishes Manchette's Fatale and The Mad and the Bad . Donald Nicholson-Smith was born in Manchester, England and is a longtime resident of New York City. For NYRB Classics he has translated Manchette's Fatale and The Mad and the Bad and Jean-Paul Clebert's Paris Vagabond , and for NYR Comics he has translated Yvan Alagbé's Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures and Nicole Claveloux's The Green Hand and Other Stories . Doug Headline is the son of Jean-Patrick Manchette. For over three decades, he has been active as a journalist, director, and screenwriter while also writing, translating, and publishing comics.

In collaboration with the artist Max Cabanes, he has adapted in graphic-novel format three of Manchette's novels, Ivory Pearl , Fatale , and Nada , and is at work on a fourth. Gary Indiana is a critic and novelist. His most recent books include I Can Give You Anything But Love , a memoir, and Tiny Fish That Only Want To Kiss , a collection of short fiction. His writing has appeared in New York Magazine , The New York Times , Vice , the London Review of Books , and many other publications.