Terry Gross

Novelist Michael Ondaatje and film director Anthony Minghella talk about the film "The English Patient." It has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards including Best Picture. Odaatje wrote the novel the original novel. The book which won him Britain's highest literary prize, the Booker Prize.

The 37-year old musician is a former member of the New York bands Last Roundup and the Shams. Her latest album is "Amy Rigby: Diary of a Mod Housewife." Rigby says a mod housewife is "woman being dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood." She also says her favorite subjects for songwriting are: "making a living, having a family, and trying to keep a sense of humor about it all." Most of her album is produced by Elliot Easton, guitarist for the Cars.

Wallace's 1,079 page novel "Infinite Jest" was critically acclaimed. His essays and stories have appeared in Harpers, The New Yorker, Playboy, The Paris Review, and others. He has a new collection of essays, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," (Little, Brown & Co.) The book's title comes from his comic account of being pampered to death on a luxury cruise, which originally appeared in Harpers.

Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Garry Wills has published books on Nixon, Reagan and Kennedy, as well as a critical profile of Ross Perot. His latest book is a look at the relationship between politics and popular culture via celebrity, "John Wayne's America: the Politics of Celebrity."

Richburg is the Hong Kong bureau chief for the "Washington Post," the paper's former Africa bureau chief, and has won awards for his reporting, including being selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In his new book "Out of America," he reflects on his three years experience in Africa and questions the connections made between the identity of African-Americans and their African roots.

Kelly worked as a construction worker for ten years, three of which he worked on the Third New York City Water Tunnel alongside other "sandhogs," Irish and West Indian urban miners who dig soft ground tunnels in the city. He also holds a master's degree from Harvard University. His first novel "Payback" tells the story of two Irish-American brothers living in 1980s New York among the Irish mob and the construction workers' unions.

One of the most popular writers of the legal thriller genre, John Grishim. The prolific writer has seven novels to his credit. His eighth and newest is "The Partner." He recently returned to practicing law.

Saul Friedlander is the author of "Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939." He examines the period looking at how Hitler's "murderous rage" and ideologies, converged with internal political pressures, and attitudes of German and European societies to create the Holocaust. Friedlander was born in Prague and was seven when his parents hid him in a Catholic seminary in France where he took on a new identity. His parents died in the Holocaust. Friedland now teaches at Tel Aviv University and at UCLA.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is the author of the controversial book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust." He offers evidence that ordinary Germans knowingly cooperated in the Holocaust, that they were motivated by anti-Semitism, not by economic hardship, coercion, or psychological pressures, as usually put forth by historians. Goldhagen is Associate Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University.

Journalist Stan Sesser is a former staff writer for the New Yorker and the senior fellow of the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley. He's been following the imminent takeover of the British-ruled Hong Kong by the Chinese government. He says while Hong Kong will most likely preserve its economic freedom, the July 1 takeover calls into question the future of its democratic government and civil-liberties laws.