Literary Figures

The British author's new book Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams is about the dark and the night, literally and figuratively. He examines night terrors, dreams, sleep research, fear of the dark, and "the dark night of the soul." He's also a poker enthusiast.

The New Yorker called Trevor"probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language." Besides his eight volumes of short stories, he has written eleven novels, several plays for stage and for radio and television, and stories for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other magazines. Early last year he published his memoir, "Excursions in the Real World," in which he writes about his family and childhood in Ireland. His most recent novel is "Felicia's Journey."

The Washington Post has called Lebowitz "the funniest woman in America." She's come out with her first children's book, "Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas." In 1978 she wrote the critically acclaimed essay collection "Metropolitan Life." Lebowitz joins Fresh Air to talk about how her relationship with writing has changed now that she's middle-aged.

In her new book "Bird by Bird," Lamott talks about the nuts and bolds of how to write, but also how to live a writer's life. Her last book was the memoir "Operating Instructions."

Brown's new book is a collection of connected short stories about caring for people with AIDS. Though the work is fiction, many of the characters are based on people she herself worked with. Brown is the author of other books including "The Terrible Girls," "Annie Oakley's Girls," and "The Children's Crusade."

Canty's stories have been published in "Esquire" and "Story" magazine. His first book is a collection of short stories, "A Stranger in This World." The stories are about people feeling alien in their own world; Canty says, "the moment I'm interested in, the moment I'm working toward in these stories, is when the familiar world seems strange. . . where they are forced to confront how little they know about themselves and about the world around them."

Kushner is the author of "Angels in America," for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Best Play. It's a two-part "seven hour epic about gays, AIDS and Reaganism" (New York "Newsday"). Kushner reads a new poem, a plea to God about the AIDS epidemic.

Michael Denneny is currently an editor at Crown Publishers. He worked with many gay authors in his 17 years at St. Martins Press, where he had his own imprint, Stonewall Editions.

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, author of "Maus," for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and "Maus II." The two book-length comics are accounts of Spiegelman's s parents' experiences in the Holocaust. He is also co-founder and editor of "Raw," a magazine of avant-garde comics. He has now illustrated "The Wild Party: The Lost Classic by Joseph Moncure March."

Panter is well known in the punk-rock scene, and was a founding member and writer of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse." She is a member of the punk band Honk if Yer Horny. In 1992, Panter co-founded The Bohemian Women's Political Alliance, a feminist organization of "the teenagers who dressed in black, the bad girls who climbed out of [their] bedroom windows at dark and caught taxis home at dawn."