Mark Costello was born and raised near Boston, and is a former federal prosecutor. In 1990 he co-authored Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present with David Foster Wallace. He published his first novel, Bag Men (1996), under the name John Flood. He teaches criminal law at Fordham University and lives in New York City with his family.

Julia Glass, Three Junes (Pantheon Books)
Set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers (1989, 1995, and 1999) in the lives of a Scottish family, this novel explores love in its limitless forms: between husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and children. At turns suspenseful, comic, and sad, these family members in inextricably entwined lives try to make peace with the past and to embrace the future.

Recipient of a 2000 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in fiction writing, Julia Glass has won several prizes for her short stories. She lives with her family in New York City, where she works as a freelance journalist and editor. Three Junes is her first published novel.

Adam Haslett, You Are Not a Stranger Here (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
A debut collection of nine stories about anguished and complex people: mourning mothers; maniacal fathers; schizophrenics; depressed, lonely teenagers; perplexed gay men; treacherous and jealous brothers; and other victims of human grief. The book is a landscape of absences, deaths, and peculiar salvations, taking place in settings ranging from the American West to New England to Great Britain.

A graduate of Swarthmore College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Adam Haslett has published work has appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, The Yale Review, BOMB magazine, and on National Public Radio's "Selected Shorts." He has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Michener/Copernicus Society of America. He is currently a student at Yale Law School.

Martha McPhee, Gorgeous Lies (Harcourt, Inc.)
In the 1970s, the media lavished attention on Anton Furey's blended family and their utopian lifestyle. Now he's dying and his "tribe" comes to reconcile with the patriarch and the life he created for all of them. Martha McPhee, in this sequel to her first novel, Bright Angel Time, paints a portrait of an era and a family that scrutinizes the obligations of love.

Martha McPhee's first novel, Bright Angel Time, was published in 1997 and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Redbook, and Open City. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Interview and Real Simple. She is the recipient of a 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Grant and has been a fellow at both the MacDowell and Yaddo artist colonies. She received her MFA from Columbia University where she has also taught in both the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs. She is co-author with Jenny and Laura McPhee of Girls, a nonfiction book. She lives in New York City with her daughter and husband.