Literary Figures: Novelists

His novel The Pleasure of My Company follows his best-selling novella Shopgirl. He wrote the play Picasso at The Lapin Agile and is the author of a collection of short stories, Cruel Shoes. Martin's screenwriting credits include L.A. Story and Roxanne. He has also starred in such films as The Jerk; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; The Lonely Guy; Parenthood; Father of the Bride; Housesitter; Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid; All of Me; The Man with Two Brains; Sgt. Bilko; Leap of Faith and Little Shop of Horrors. He won a Grammy Award for his album Let's Get Small.

His new semi-autobiographical novel, The Fortress of Solitude, tells the story of Dylan Ebdus, a white kid growing up in an African-American and Latino neighborhood in New York. His last novel, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. His other books include Girl in Landscape and Amnesia Moon.

Lahiri's new novel is The Namesake. Lahiri won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies, her collection of short stories. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is about being an Indian immigrant in America, when the Ganguli family leaves Calcutta and settles in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Writer Eric Dezenhall, a damage control expert, is president of the PR firm Nicholas-Dezenhall Communications Management Group based in Washington, D.C. He has in the past described his business as a response to "the culture of the attack." He appears regularly on Hardball and The O'Reilly Factor. Dezenhall worked for the Reagan administration.

Underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner. In 1976 Pekar published the first in a series of comic books about his mundane life as a veterans hospital clerk and record collector in Cleveland. It was called American Splendor, and he has continued to publish them since. In 1987 one of them earned him an American Book Award. Now he is the subject of the new film American Splendor which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.

Krakauer is the author of the book Into Thin Air, about the disastrous 1996 Mount Everest climb in which eight climbers were killed. His new book, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, is about Mormon fundamentalism and the story of the two Lafferty brothers who murdered a woman and her infant daughter because they say that they had received a revelation from God to do so. Krakauer reports there are some 40,000 Mormon fundamentalists in the American West, Canada and Mexico. The Mormon Church does not recognize fundamentalists as part of their faith.

She is the author of the best-selling book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, about the horse who became a racetrack sensation in the 1930s. Her book is the basis of the new film starring Tobey Maguire, Jeff Bridges and Chris Cooper. The New York Times called the book, "a captivating story... with the detail of good history, the blistering pace of Seabiscuit himself, and the charm of grand legend." Hillenbrand has chronic fatigue syndrome and during the writing of Seabiscuit, she almost never left her home. She has been writing about thoroughbred racing for 15 years.

Shields died July 17, 2003, of breast cancer. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling novel The Stone Diaries. Her books are often about middle class people leading quiet lives. Her other novels include Larry's Party, which won Britain's Orange Prize, The Republic of Love and Swann: A Mystery. She also wrote a biography of Jane Austen as well as plays, poetry and story collections. In 1998 Shields was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time of the interview, she was in stage 4, a late stage of the disease. Her most recent novel, Unless, was written after her diagnosis.

Murray has written a new collection of short stories, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies. Many of his stories are informed by his experiences as a doctor with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service when he traveled to developing countries like Burundi, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Murray is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

He has written his first novel for adults, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The narrator of the story is an autistic teenager who is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and who must prove his innocence when a neighborhood dog is killed. One reviewer described it as "wonderful, simple, moving, and likely to be a smash." Haddon lives in England and teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and for Oxford University.