Michael Henry Heim was a professor of Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature at UCLA. He was a prolific translator of Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, German, Dutch, Italian, and French literature. His translations include Chekhov’s plays and a collection of Chekhov’s letters, three novels and a play by Milan Kundera, two novels and a collection of stories by Bohumil Hrabal, two novels by Danilo Kis, a children’s novel by Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass’s My Century, and works by contemporary Russian novelists (Vassily Aksyonov, Felix Roziner, Sasha Sokolov) and Hungarian novelists (Istvan Örkeny, Peter Esterhazy, György Konrad). Heim died in September of 2012.