James Naughtonwas Lecturer at the University of Oxford, UK. He was the author of Colloquial Czech and Colloquial Slovak , both published by Routledge. His published translations include Bohumil Hrabal'sCutting it Short,The Little Town Where Time Stood Still,Total Fears: Letters to Dubenkaand Miroslav Holub's The Jingle-bell Principle. He also contributed to the Traveller's Literary Companion to Eastern and Central Europe , and several anthologies. Karen von Kunes is a Lecturer at Yale University, USA. She is the author of Czech Practical Dictionary: Czech-English/English-Czech and of Beyond the Imaginable: 240 Ways of Looking at Czech . She is the editor-in-chief and coauthorof Barron's TravelWise Czech , the translator of JiÅí Voskovec and Jan Werich's play SvÄt za mÅízemi in Laurence Senelick's volume Cabaret Performance and the author of introductions to translated novels. She has also published 'Annotated Bibliography on Czech and Slovak Literary Theory' in the series New Literary History: International Bibliography of Literary Theory and Interpretation and has contributed scholarly articles on Czech culture, film and literature in various periodicals.

Her most recent publication is Milan Kundera's Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals , and in 2013 she published her novel Among the Sinners .