Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's most versatile, serious writers, the author of a number of distinguished books in several genres, all published within the past twenty-five years. In addition to numerous novels and short story collections, she has published several volumes of poetry, several books of plays, five books of literary criticism, and the book-length essay On Boxing. Her writing has earned her much praise and many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in short fiction, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy - Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, the National Book Award for her novel Them, and in 1978, membership in the American Academy-Institute. What I Lived For was nominated for the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award.Ms. Oates's recent works include Broke Heart Blues (Dutton) 1999; Gemini: An American Epic (Harper Collins) 1999; My Heart Laid Bare (Dutton), The Collector of Hearts (Dutton), Gothic short stories, and New Plays (Ontario Review Press) all in 1998; Man Crazy (Dutton) 1997; Double Delight (Dutton) 1997; We Were The Mulvaneys (Dutton) 1996; Tenderness (Ontario Review) 1996; Will You Always Love Me? And Other Short Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (1996); and Zombie, a bold and thrilling exploration into the life and mind of a serial killer (1995). She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Shashi Tharoor has served with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose Singapore office he headed during the "boat people" crisis. Since October 1989, he has been a senior official at UN HQ in New York, where, until late 1996, he was responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia. From January 1997 to July 1998, he was executive assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In July 1998, he was appointed director of communications and special projects in the office of the Secretary-General. In January 2001, he was appointed by the Secretary-General as interim head of the Dept. of Public Information. Tharoor is the author of numerous articles, short stories and commentaries in Indian and Western publications, and the winner of several journalism and literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize.His books include Reasons of State (1982) a scholarly study of Indian foreign policy; The Great Indian Novel (1989), a political satire; The Five-Dollar Smile & Other Stories (1990); and a second novel, Show Business (1992), which received a front-page accolade from The New York Times Book Review. Show Business has been made into a motion picture titled Bollywood. His previous book India: From Midnight to the Millennium was published on the 50th anniversary of India's independence. On August 13, 2001 Penguin Books (India) published Tharoor's latest novel Riot. The US edition was published by Arcade on September 28, 2001.