Literary Figures: Novelists

Writer Ben Cheever's new book is called Selling Ben Cheever: Back to Square One in a Service Economy (Bloomsbury). In 1995, Cheever lost his publisher and was not able to sell his third novel. To continue working, he decided to take jobs at chain bookstores, car dealerships, and sandwich shops. His book is about his 5 years working in the 'service economy.' Cheever's novels include The Plagiarist, The Partisan, and Famous After Death. He has been a newspaper reporter and an editor at Reader's Digest.

Author Hanif Kureishi's new novel is Gabriel Gift, (Scribner) about a 15-year-old boy and his struggles with his artistic soul and restless parents. Simultaneously two of Kureishi works are coming out in a combined paperback edition: Intimacy: A Novel and Midnight All Day: Stories. (Scribner). Intimacy has been adapted to film. Several of Kureishi earlier novels, My Beautiful Laundrette, and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, were also made into films.

Author Jonathan Franzen joins Fresh Air to discuss his latest novel, The Corrections. The story revolves around the lives of three children who live far away from their aging parents. The parents' health problems have made it difficult for them to take care of themselves. The children then have to decide how willing they are to change their own lives to care for their parents.

Editor and writer Walter Kirn lives in Montana, a place where many people are thinking of moving to - now that the United States is under threat of more terrorist attacks. Kirn was recently on Fresh Air to discuss his new novel Up in the Air (Doubleday) about 35 year-old Ryan Bingham, a well-traveled business man who has a goal of accumulating one million miles in his frequent flyer account. Kirn is the literary editor for GQ and a contributing editor to Time and Vanity Fair.

Pakistani novelist and New Yorker Mohsin Hamid. His debut novel is Moth Smoke

Cartoonist Daniel Clowes. Drawn in 1950s pop culture style, his comics are darkly humorous satires of middle class America. His graphic novel Ghost World (first published in 1993) is the basis of the new film of the same name. His first comic book series was Lloyd Llewellyn, followed by Eightball (both published by Fantagraphics Books). Clowes was the first cartoonist to contribute a comic story to Esquire annual fiction issue.

Writer and radio personality Garrison Keillor. He is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion, broadcast from Minnesota and heard weekly on public radio stations nationwide. Keillor has just published two new books. One is a semi-autobiographical novel, called Lake Wobegon Summer 1956. (Viking) The other is in collaboration with photographer Richard Olsenius: In Search of Lake Wobegon (Viking Studio). It an effort to capture in words and pictures the people and places that inspired the fictional town of Lake Wobegon.

Author Allen Kurzweil's latest novel is the literary thriller The Grand Complication. His first novel, A Case of Curiosities, (Harcourt, 1992) received international critical acclaim. Kurzweil worked for many years as a freelance journalist in Europe before settling in the United States and turning his attention to fiction.

A native of Mississippi, Barry Hannah has been writing for over thirty years - short stories, and novels set in the South. His writing is described as intensely personal, frenetic and comic. Truman Capote once called him the maddest writer in the USA His first book, the autobiographical novel Geronimo Rex (published in 1972) won the William Faulkner Prize for writing. He followed that with Airships, a collection of short stories now considered a classic.

Novelist Nick Hornby's new book is How to Be Good a novel about a bitter and sarcastic man who becomes a –do-gooder.— He also the author of the bestseller High Fidelity (which was made into a film starring John Cusack), Fever Pitch, and About a Boy. Hornby is also the pop music critic for The New Yorker.