(This recording contains explicit content.)

Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy has twice been named to Granta's list of Best Young British Novelists, and her literary awards include the Somerset Maugham Award for Looking for the Possible Dance and the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize for Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains. Her work favors emotionally laden realism punctuated with dark humor and resonant descriptive passages. Of What Becomes, Kennedy's latest story collection, a New York Times reviewer writes, "Perception moves the story forward. Kennedy mines the present moment, watching it tangle with the past and the future. She’s less interested in traditional notions of plot than the dramatic flailing of a character’s interior world."

Satirist Gary Shteyngart was named to The New Yorker's most recent list of "20 Under 40" writers worth watching. Born in Leningrad, USSR, he immigrated to the United States at age seven. His first critically acclaimed novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, which contains autobographical elements about the immigrant experience, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was a national bestseller and was named of the 10 Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.