Jonathan Lethem and Lydia Millet.

Lethem, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his fifth novel Motherless Brooklyn, grew up in Brooklyn and Kansas City and trained as a painter before turning to writing in his early twenties. Recently he’s offered some of his short stories for free to filmmakers and others who wish to adapt them, through his own version of the open-source movement, which he calls the Promiscuous Materials project. He also recently married for the third time and in May 2007 had a baby son, Everett. His most recent novel is You Don’t Love Me Yet, out in paperback from Doubleday.

Like Lethem, Lydia Millet has a young child—two in fact; a four-year-old girl and a boy born a few months ago. She is the author of six novels, the latest of which, How the Dead Dream, was published by Counterpoint in January and is planned as the first in a trilogy. Millet, who won the PEN USA Award for Fiction for her early book My Happy Life, grew up in Toronto and now lives in the Arizona desert where she writes and works for her husband’s endangered species group, the Center for Biological Diversity.

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Issue 103 Spring 2008