Literary Figures

From 1998 to 2000, William Queen went undercover for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and rode with the Mongols, a southern California motorcycle gang. His new book is Under and Alone.

Writer James Atlas' new book is a collection of essays called My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale. James Atlas is the founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives Series. He writes for The New Yorker. He was also an editor at The New York Times Magazine. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and Vanity Fair. He is the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Judith Warner is the author of the new book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. In it she writes about the "choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret" that is poisoning motherhood for American women. Warner is a former special correspondent for Newsweek in Paris.

After a chart-topping and occasionally controversial music career, she is now turning out children's books, publishing four in just over a year. Her latest is The Adventures of Abdi. The others are The English Roses, Mr. Peabody's Apples and Yakov and the Seven Thieves. Her fifth, Lotsa de Casha, is due out in April 2005.

Christopher Dickey is Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek.. His new novel, The Sleeper, is a thriller about a former terrorist living the United States who hunts down his former al Qaeda comrades after Sept. 11.

His colorful, chaotic, bold, vibrant and often comic paintings of New York City feature the spectrum of life from prostitutes, thieves and gamblers to tourists, shoppers and moms and dads. When he was 20, nearly 50 years ago, Grooms moved to New York City from Nashville, and his visceral reaction to the city has informed his paintings since. There's a new book of his work (the first major book on Grooms in 20 years), Red Grooms.

If you know him by his full name, you probably watch Six Feet Under on HBO, of which he's co-executive producer. If you know him by his initials, B.E.K., you probably read The New Yorker, where his single-panel cartoons are regularly featured. A new collection of his cartoons, This is a Bad Time, has just been published by Simon and Schuster.

Sedaris is the author of the bestselling collections Barrel Fever, Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day. His new collection is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Sedaris essays appear regularly in Esquire, GQ and The New Yorker. His radio pieces can be heard on This American Life. In 2001 he became the third recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

Seagle has written for Superman and Uncanny X-Men as well as House of Secrets: Foundation, a supernatural court drama comic. He's teamed up with artist Teddy Kristiansen for the new graphic novel, It's a Bird... In this semi-autographical book Seagle deconstructs the classic Superman myth and reflects on power and powerlessness.

Her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a best seller in Britain, is a narrative history of punctuation. Truss claims that with the advent of e-mail and text messaging, proper punctuation is an endangered species. Truss is also the author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas. She has been a television critic and sports columnist for The Times (London). She also won Columnist of the Year award for her work for Women's Journal. She now reviews books for the Sunday Times of London.