Nathan Englander + Amir Raz

Prize-winning writer Nathan Englander has wild, vivid dreams. Neuroscientist Amir Raz specializes in hypnotism and used to be a magician. What will they have in common?
Nathan Englander‘s short fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, and numerous anthologies including The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Anthology, and the Pushcart Prize. His story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Knopf, 1999), became an international bestseller. This title earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by the New Yorker. He was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2004, he was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The Ministry of Special Cases, which was published in 2008, is his first novel.
Amir Raz is a clinical neuroscientist who holds the Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. Raz heads both the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at McGill and the Clinical Neuroscience and Applied Cognition Laboratory at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Jewish General Hospital (JGH). He is the recipient of multiple accolades, including the 2006 Young Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) and the 2005 American Psychological Association’s Early Career Award (Division 30). Raz is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Mind-Body Regulation and a member of the McGill Board of Governors.