Terry Gross

Writer Alec Wilkinson is the author of new memoir, My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell (Houghton Mifflin) about his relationship with writer and editor William Maxwell. Maxwell was fiction editor for the New Yorker from 1936-1976 and worked with such authors as J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty and scores of others. Maxwell was the author of a number of novels, including Time Will Darken It, and So Long, See You Tomorrow, as well as several short story collections. He died at the age of 91 in August 2000.

Novelist Rick Moody is the author of The Ice Storm which was made into a film, and the short story collection Demonology. He calls his new book, The Black Veil, a "sort of non-fiction novel." It parallels Moody's investigation of his own family's history of depression. He found that one of his ancestors — a clergyman — was the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Minister's Black Veil."

Host of NPR's Talk of the Nation, Neal Conan. During the summer of 2000, he took a hiatus from his duties at NPR to follow the fortunes of the Aberdeen Arsenal, a minor league baseball team. Conan pursued a lifelong dream: to become a baseball announcer. He writes about it in his new book: Play by Play: Baseball, Radio and Life in the Last Chance League (Crown Publishers).