Lutz Bassmann belongs to a community of imaginary authors invented, championed, and literarily realized by Antoine Volodine, a French writer of Slavic origins born in 1950. Volodine's many celebrated, category-defying works include the award-winning Minor Angels (Nebraska, 2004), which blends science fiction, Tibetan myth, a ludic approach to writing, and a profound humanistic idealism. Jordan Stump is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of The Other Book (Nebraska, 2011), has translated numerous texts, including Minor Angels, and was awarded the French-American Foundation's translation prize and the Prix Médicis in 2014.