A Dream of the Earthly Paradise Gone Wrong.

Writer Cynthia Ozick. In 1981 and 1984, Ozick's two stories, "The Shawl" and "Rosa" won the O. Henry Prize award. Both stories appear in Ozick's new book, called The Shawl. In it, Ozick looks at what it means to `survive' the Nazi concentration camps, telling the story of Rosa, who witnesses the murder of her infant daughter in the camps. Later, living in Miami, Rosa imagines her daughter alive and married to a doctor in the United States.

Novelist Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, Something Happened and No Laughing Matter, his 1985 account of being stricken with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a neurological disease in which the peripheral nervous system is attacked. Within two weeks of the first symptoms, Heller could hardly breathe or swallow. It took him two years to relearn his basic motor functions. Heller's best known work is still his first, Catch 22, a satire of the military bureaucracy and the madness of war.

Alexandra Auder's mother, Viva, was one of Andy Warhol's muses. Growing up in Warhol's orbit meant Auder's childhood was an unusual one. For several years, Viva, Auder and Auder's younger half-sister, Gaby Hoffmann, lived in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. It was was famous for having been home to Leonard Cohen, Dylan Thomas, Virgil Thomson, and Bob Dylan, among others.