Moshe Ron was born in 1945 and grew up on the outskirts of Tel Aviv; served in the Israeli army for two years; took a BA degree in Romance Languages and English Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; spent 1968/9 in the English Department of SUNY Buffalo before transferring to the Comparative Literature Department at Yale, where he wrote a dissertation with Paul de Man getting his PhD in 1975; since then taught English and Comparative Literature at Hebrew U. before retiring in 2006; concurrently became involved in the Hebrew publishing world as editor and translator; American authors he translated include Raymond Chandler, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Robert Coover, Gilbert Sorrentino, Steve Katz, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, John Gardner, Joy Williams, Richard Ford, Harry Mathews, Michael Chabon; has also translated from French (notably Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie, forthcoming) and Spanish (notably, in collaboration with Adam Ron Blumenthal, Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes). "Spider" was included in a collection of short stories, Avedot Kalot (Light Losses) published in 2002; Moshe Ron is an inveterate resident of Tel Aviv.