Literary Nonfiction. Art. Music. Kessler's lens is wide but his focus is sharp as he surveys, with clarity and fresh understanding, both famous and unsung figures of contemporary culture. Selected from more than thirty years of journalism, THE TOLSTOY OF THE ZULUS includes 55 essays on such diverse topics as the creative repercussions of September 11, the art of the letter, a trip to Disneyland, Google's Universal Library, the Watts Towers, Marlon Brando, Charles Manson, Bob Dylan, Luis Buñuel, J. D. Salinger, Romare Bearden, Philip Roth, Harry Belafonte, Edward Hopper, Thelonious Monk, Charles Bukowski, Saul Bellow and an array of other, less celebrated but equally remarkable players in the multifaceted cultural life of our times. Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator and editor. Born in Los Angeles in 1947, he received his BA in languages and literature from Bard College and an MA in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He published his first essays and criticism in the early 1970s, and his reviews, columns, articles, features and interviews have appeared steadily since then in dozens of magazines and newspapers, chiefly in Northern California. He was the founding editor and publisher of the international journal Alcatraz (1979-1985) and of the Santa Cruz newsweekly The Sun (1986-1989). He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his translations of Luis Cernuda, and is the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges. His recent books include NEED I SAY MORE? (El León Literary Arts, 2015), WHERE WAS I? (Greenhouse Review Press, 2015), the poetry collection SCRATCH PEGASUS (Swan Scythe Press, 2013), translations of Vicente Aleixandre, the essay collection THE TOLSTOY OF THE ZULUS (El León Literary Arts, 2011), and the novel THE MENTAL TRAVELER (Greenhouse Review Press, 2010).From 1999 through 2014 he was the editor of the award-winning literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review . He lives in Santa Cruz.