Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) was born in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, where she led an idyllic childhood. At the age of twenty, she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy, a Parisian man of letters under whose name she published the Claudine novels. Separated from Willy in 1905, Colette supported herself as an actress before establishing her own reputation as a writer. She was celebrated in later years as one of the great figures of twentieth-century French life and letters, and was the first woman to be accorded a state funeral by the French Republic. Her novel, The Pure and the Impure, is available as an NYRB Classic.

Paul Eprile is a publisher, poet, and translator. He has previously translated Jean Giono's Hill, The Open Road, and Melville, for which he was a co-winner of the 2018 Annual Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation (all available as NYRB Classics). He lives on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario, Canada.

Judith Thurman is a biographer and critic. A staff writer at The New Yorker, she is also the author Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the 1983 National Book Award for nonfiction, and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography and the Salon Book Award for biography.