Marie Chaix, born in Lyons and raised in Paris, is the author of nine books, seven of them autobiographical, two of them novels. She became famous at the appearance of her first work, The Laurels of Lake Constance, translated by Harry Mathews, in which she retraces the life of her collaborationist father and that of her family during the postwar years. The Summer of the Elder Tree, a memoir and meditation on the theme of separation, was published in Paris in 2005, her first book to appear in fourteen years. The mother of two daughters by a first marriage, Marie Chaix is married to the writer Harry Mathews and spends half of each year in America and half in France. 

Born in Manhattan, Harry Mathews moved to France in 1953, and now spends half his life there and half in Key West. He is a poet and the  author of six novels, and has translated three works by the French author Marie Chaix, his wife of many years, as well as Goerges Bataille's Blue of Noon, Jeanne Cordelier's The Life: Memoirs of a French Hooker, Raymons Roussel's The Dust of Suns, and Georges Perec's Ellis Island.  

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