Author Rosellen Brown on What Happens "Before and After" Family Tragedy

Brown wrote the novels "Civil Wars" and "Tender Mercies." Her newest is called "Before and After." It's the story of a family's struggle to survive tragedy: their seventeen-year-old son Jacob conceals his darker side from his parents until the chief of police comes looking for Jacob one night in connection with the murder of his pregnant girlfriend.

In Art and Madness, her memoir of the literary 1950s, writer Anne Roiphe describes going into labor by herself in a snowdrift, unable to waker her sleeping playwright husband. Over the years, she learns her own power, charting her course through feminism and a life in art.

After Hustvedt suffered several unexplainable seizure-like episodes that defied medical diagnoses, she decided to chart her experiences -- and the murky intersection between mind, brain and body -- in a new book, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.