Terry Gross

Late night talk show host Conan O'Brien celebrates ten years on the air Sunday September 14, 2003, with a primetime special on NBC. In 1993, he moved into the Late Night host slot when David Letterman went to CBS. Prior to Late Night, O'Brien was a writer for Saturday Night Live and writer and producer for The Simpsons.

Peter Kornbluh is director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project.

Peter Kornbluh is director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project. He led the campaign to declassify official documents of the secret history of the United States government support for the Pinochet dictatorship. That information has now been collected in the new book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. The book chronicles 20 years of policy in Chile from 1970 to 1990.

He's got a new series on CBS called The Handler in which he plays an FBI agent. It will premier on September 26, 2003. He is perhaps best known for his role as Ralph Cifaretto on the HBO series The Sopranos and has also appeared in more than 60 films, including Memento, The Matrix and The Fugitive. His memoir is called Who's Sorry Now: The True Story of a Stand-Up Guy. This interview first aired October 1, 2002.

His novel Middlesex is about a contemporary hermaphrodite. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year, and is now out in paperback. Eugenides is also the author of the novel The Virgin Suicides, which was made into a movie. Eugenides' fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and Best American Short Stories. This interview first aired September 24, 2002.

Keillor's new book is Love Me: A Novel. It's about the ambitions of a frustrated writer who publishes a piece in The New Yorker, writes a disappointing debut novel, and ends up penning an advice column in the local newspaper. Keillor is the host of A Prairie Home Companion, on the air since 1974. He has written 13 books, including Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, Wobegon Boy and Wobegon Days.

Enter MeFranken's new book is Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Franken recently made headlines when the Fox News Channel tried to sue him over the phrase "fair and balanced," which Fox claimed as its own. Fox lost, and Franken got lots of publicity for the book, which is now a bestseller. Al Franken is an alumnus of Saturday Night Live, where his most memorable character was the simpering self-help sap Stuart Smalley.

Pete Best was the drummer for The Beatles in their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg. His mother, Mona Best, was the owner of The Casbah Coffee Club in Liverpool. The various early incarnations of The Beatles played The Casbah more than 90 times. Best has just co-written a large-format book, The Beatles: The True Beginnings. Today he writes, records and tours with his own group, The Pete Best Band.

Thomson's latest book is The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. It's an updated version of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in 1975. Some of the entries from the dictionary have been revised and new entries added. Thomson has taught film studies at Dartmouth College and served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Film Comment, Movieline, The New Republic and The Independent.