Richard Stern is the Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. In 1985 he won the Medal of Merit for the Novel awarded every six years by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His recent works include Pacific Tremors, published by TriQuarterly Books in 2001, and What Is What Was (Chicago, 2001). Almonds to Zhoof, The Collected Stories of Richard Stern is forthcoming from TriQuarterly Books in Fall 2004.

I think Stitch is brilliant.... No one that I know has handled Americans abroad with a directness and an urgency that leaves the picture cleansed of any travel-book fuzz. - John Cheever; ""The fluency of the book is superb - a shorthand full of grace, immediately communicating a great many feelings and meanings. What James more elaborately was doing when people still had patience with the elaborate.... It's a very fine thing."" - Saul Bellow; ""Stitch tells the truth, and of course, more than the truth. The emotion is fully there.... Stern's best book."" - Bernard Malamud; ""Stern's best so far; and his best is so beautifully damn good.... I cared for its sorrows, and for its austere and skeptical morale."" - Howard Nemerov