The book links are to Amazon, but you can also find an independent bookstore through booksense.com.

Bliss Broyard is the author of My Father, Dancing

Austin Bunn is a freelance writer, carpenter, & rock 'n roller.

Mark Boal won a Project Censored 2000 award for this piece in Mother Jones & wrote this piece on the "It" Question

Maud Casey is the author of the novel The Shape of Things to Come

Nell Casey is the editor of Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, a national bestseller.

John Cloud wrote this cover piece on Ecstasy for Time Magazine

Pat C. Hoy II is an essayist, author, writing instructor, and instructor of instructors. He co-edited the Scribner Handbook for Writers. Several of his essays are online, including "Soldiers and Scholars." You can find his essay collection Instinct for Survival at www.bookfinder.com.

Dan Kennedy, my comic friend, will make you laugh & weep—and again & again & again & why not one more time?

Debra Marquart is author of The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories and Everything's a Verb: Poems

Nicholas Montemarano is the author of two forthcoming books, a novel and a short-story collection. You can find a bunch of his stories on-line, including this one, "To Fall Apart," in the Florida Review.

Chris Offutt is the author of Kentucky Straight, Out of the Woods, The Good Brother, and The Same River Twice.

Eric Schlosser is author of Fast Food Nation and these pieces for the Atlantic Monthly (among others): "The Prison-Industrial Complex", "A Grief Like No Other", and "Marijuana and the Law."

David Shenk, my brother, is author of the forthcoming book The Forgetting, which John Bayley has called "the definitive work on Alzheimer's."

Steve Silberman is digaman.

Lauren Slater is author of Welcome to My Country, Prozac Diary, and Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.