Terry Gross

After a chart-topping and occasionally controversial music career, she is now turning out children's books, publishing four in just over a year. Her latest is The Adventures of Abdi. The others are The English Roses, Mr. Peabody's Apples and Yakov and the Seven Thieves. Her fifth, Lotsa de Casha, is due out in April 2005.

Actress Sandra Oh, now seen in the film Sideways, is becoming a familiar face to both TV and movie audiences.

Oh began her career on Canadian television before coming to the United States. She gained notice as an intrepid assistant on the HBO series Arli$$, for which she won a Cable Ace award. Her films include Under the Tuscan Sun, Bean, and The Red Violin. She has also appeared in episodes of Six Feet Under and Judging Amy.

As part of the first cast of Saturday Night Live, Dan Aykroyd helped bring the Coneheads and the Blues Brothers to life.

He went on to star in a number of films, including Trading Places and Grosse Pointe Blank. He also received an Academy Award nomination for his role in Driving Miss Daisy.

We talk with Aykroyd about his two latest projects: the book Elwood's Blues: Interviews with the Blues Legends and Stars, and the upcoming movie Christmas with the Kranks.

Writer Augusten Burroughs is the author of two best-selling, often bitingly funny memoirs. In his first, Running With Scissors, he recalled his mentally ill mother, who gave him away to her equally mentally ill shrink — who then adopted him. Of that experience, Burroughs wrote, "I then lived a life of squalor, pedophiles, no schools and free pills." His second memoir, Dry, was about getting sober in a 28-day stay at a gay alcoholism-rehab center. Burroughs' new book is a collection of stories, Magical Thinking.

James Bennet is the former Jerusalem Bureau chief for The New York Times. He recently returned to the Middle East to cover the death of Arafat and the jockeying for power among the Palestinian factions.

Caouette made his filmmaking debut with the autobiographical documentary Tarnation. He made it on his home computer for only $218. It includes snapshots, super-8 home movies, answering machine messages and dramatic reenactments from his chaotic upbringing in a dysfunctional Texas family.

Pickett's novel Sideways has been made into a critically acclaimed film starring Thomas Paul Giamatti and Haden Church (left). It's about two ex-college roommates, now middle-aged, who set off on a week's trip through California wine country.

British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge traveled across America to write their new book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America. The book examines the history of the conservative movement in the United States. Micklethwait and Wooldridge both write for The Economist.

Edmund White has been writing about gay culture in fiction and nonfiction since the 1970s. His new book is a collection of his essays, Arts and Letters. White is director of the creative writing program at Princeton University.

Leigh's social-realist comedies depict British working class life. He begins work on his films without a script, piecing them together from improvisations with his cast. His latest film is Vera Drake about a working class woman in Britain in the 1950s who secretly performs abortions.