IT Critic's Critic
HEIDI JULAVITS
AGE 35
WHY HER? Her first novel, 2000's The Mineral Palace, got great reviews. And yet she still took a big bear swipe at critics in ''The Snarky Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing,'' a throw-down essay that ran in the first issue of her new Dave Eggers-backed literary journal, The Believer (fellow It Lister ZZ Packer is a columnist).
A BAD REVIEW? BRING IT. ''If there's one thing that I've been frustrated with in terms of how my essay has been read -- and I would put 'read' in quotes because this is how it gets talked about by people who haven't actually read it -- it's that they feel I'm advocating this toothless form of criticism.''
IDEAL BOOK REVIEWER ''An excited fan.''
WORST JOB ''I was 25 years old and working a catering gig at this huge New Yorker fashion-issue party at the beginning of the Tina Brown era. I was dressed up as Eustace Tilley, the New Yorker character with the top hat and butterfly. We literally had these rhinestone monocles glued into our eye sockets.''
NEXT Book critics will get to sink their teeth into her second novel, The Effect of Living Backwards, when it's published this month.
IT Dry Guy
AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
AGE 37
WHY HIM? His first memoir, the twisted and delicious Running With Scissors, about growing up with a cuckoo-clock mother and her sick shrink, was a surprise best-seller. But no one will be shocked when his second memoir, Dry, about his hard-drinking days in New York City's advertising world, follows suit.
AND HE THOUGHT HIS CHILDHOOD WAS CRAZY... ''I had an old lady stop me on the street, very well dressed, very attractive. And she said, 'I loved your memoir! You know, when I was a little girl, my mother gave me Dr Pepper enemas and made me drink them!'''
ON HITTING THE BOTTLE ''It seems like everyone is an alcoholic, about to be an alcoholic, or married to one.''
ON HITTING THE ROAD He'll visit 10 cities before letting loose on a western Massachusetts car dealership. ''I'm doing a reading at the end of my tour at my brother's parking lot. He's been selling my books on the front register, so he said, 'We'll do an evening of cars and literature!'''
ON HIS PAST ''[My childhood] was dirty, it was foul, it was skanky, it was humiliating, it was just crazy. But it feels wonderful to have turned such a hideous tuna can of a childhood into something shiny and nice.''
ON HIS PRESENT ''I'm happier than I even knew I was allowed to wish to be. I'm in a really stable relationship, I have close friends, and I have this dream career.''
NEXT Look for Magical Thinking, a collection of true stories culled from his life, in 2004. ''I'm going to write a book a year, until people get too sick of me.'' Impossible.
IT Get Shorties
ZZ PACKER + ANTHONY DOERR
AGES 30, 29
WHY THEM? Their short-story debuts -- Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere and Doerr's award-winning The Shell Collector -- are more substantial than stuff 10 times their length.
WEIRD BRUSHES WITH CELEBRITY Doerr says Michael Keaton read his story ''The Hunter's Wife'' and loved it. ''I've actually had beers [with him]. He'll just call and be like, 'What's going on?!' That is so bizarre to me. And flattering.'' Packer's fans include John Updike, who picked Coffee for the Today show book club in May.
WORST JOB Packer cleaned toilets at Yale, but says that was cake compared with writing content for a dotcom start-up. ''You had kids who were, like, 23... and they had all this money, and they were like Marketing Blah Blah Blah.... It was culturally bankrupt.''
NEXT Writing novels. Packer will tackle the Buffalo Soldiers; Doerr's protagonist is a snow hydrologist who believes his dreams predict the future. (''Sounds cheesy, but I take heart in that a lot of my favorite novels sound cheesy when you summarize them.'')
IT 'Island' Girl
JENNIFER VANDERBES
AGE 28
WHY HER? The New Yorker's sprawling debut, Easter Island, is a brainy page-turner about two linked visits -- one in 1913, one in 1973 -- to the mysterious Polynesian retreat. It's like an Oprah book even Jonathan Franzen could love.
BOOK-TOUR JITTERS ''I suddenly realized last night I have no signature. You sort of feel when you're signing a book it should look professional.''
WORST JOB ''At the Pocahontas premiere in Central Park, I worked at the refreshment stand. I was reading Anna Karenina at the time, trying to finish the last few pages while filling Coke cups, dressed in Pocahontas gear.''
NEXT Another novel, but...''I'm superstitious -- I haven't even told my agent what it's about.''
IT Editor
SEAN McDONALD
AGE 30
WHY HIM? Writers like Aleksandar Hemon (Nowhere Man) and Nicola Griffith (Stay) trust him with their words, and he believed in James Frey and his A Million Little Pieces. All the while, he's unpretentious and understated and on a monster roll.
WHY HE EDITS ''You do all this [work], and one day a box comes from the printer, and it's full of these books! It's a moment of thrilling, concrete accomplishment.''
IF HE WEREN'T EDITING, HE'D BE... Designing sneakers or producing videogames.
NEXT Comic-strip artist David Rees' My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable, due from Riverhead this fall.
IT Best Buy
SOPHIE KINSELLA
AGE 33
WHY HER? The latest in her frothy Shopaholic series -- Shopaholic Ties the Knot, again starring endearing Brit Becky Bloomwood -- gives chick-lit lovers a reason to stay home from the mall.
TOUGH RESEARCH ''I'm married, but I obviously had to relive the experience of trying on wedding dresses. So I took off my wedding ring, went to Vera Wang, posed as a real bride, and spent a very, very happy afternoon.''
PURCHASE SHE MOST REGRETS ''I bought a pair of very high, diamante-covered shoes in Spain. Every time I put them on I can't take a step, so I just look at them.... I should put them in a case like some kind of installation art.''
WORST JOB ''Having to write a 12-page [magazine] feature on pensions,'' sighs the former financial reporter. ''I love making up stories, [so] I wasn't a good journalist.''
NEXT Writing a screenplay based on her latest novel, Can You Keep a Secret?, which was optioned by Paramount with Kate Hudson attached to star. She also has a fourth Shopaholic in the works.
IT Classic
T.C. BOYLE
AGE 54
WHY HIM? He of the 24-hour spongy bouffant and red Converse sneakers finally hit the New York Times best-seller list for Drop City, a deeply felt, cartwheeling romp that relocates a happy band of California hippies to Alaska. No doubt some of the sweetest reviews of his 15-book career helped.
BRUTAL HONESTY ''Of course I want to be on the best-seller list! I believe in my work, and I think everybody should be reading it, especially instead of whatever else is on the best-seller list, which is usually if not exclusively genre crap.''
FAVORITE WRITER Flannery O'Connor. '''A Good Man Is Hard to Find' was my first experience with a kind of literature that's very important for what I do. It's a story that has a comic mode, but then it turns the knife in your guts.''
CAREER HIGH ''The acceptance of The Tortilla Curtain [his 1995 novel about illegal Mexican immigrants] as a classic that, like, every high school kid in California has to read.... My poor son, who's a junior, had to [read it] for his class. I'm going to help him with the paper.''
CAREER-HIGH GRAVY ''I like to picture some of those [Tortilla Curtain] reviewers who cut me a new a -- hole, bent over their kids' typewriters, helping them write the paper on Tortilla Curtain.''
NEXT Finishing up a novel about sex researcher Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey.
IT Clean Start
CHERYL MENDELSON
AGE 56
WHY HER? Her debut novel, Morningside Heights (the first in a planned trilogy), about intertwined lives in a Manhattan apartment building, establishes her as a modern-day Trollope.
WHY'S HER NAME SO FAMILIAR? Mendelson wrote 1999's best-seller Home Comforts, a primer on scrubbing floors and folding laundry. But that, she says, was just a detour: ''I've been writing fiction my entire adult life, but I hardly showed it to anyone. I burned my first novel.''
NEXT Writing part 2 of the trilogy.
IT Sweetheart
HILARY LIFTIN
AGE 33
WHY HER? By filtering life through a lollipop-colored lens, Liftin's Candy and Me, a memoir of her serious sugar addiction -- a favorite childhood snack was cupfuls of powdered sugar and milk -- is palpable and utterly edible.
CREATIVE CRUTCH ''I had an empty pack of Bottle Caps [candy] taped to my monitor. If I had only one favorite candy, there wouldn't be a book, but Bottle Caps are certainly closest to my heart.''
INFLUENCES ''I ping-pong between Proust and the tabloids. I'm also obsessed with Arctic exploration.''
SECRET TALENTS ''I compulsively matchmake and provide unsolicited advice. Recently two friends told me that in tricky spots they had asked themselves, 'What would Hilary do?' I was flattered and very worried for them.''
NEXT Liftin just moved from Brooklyn to L.A. to try television writing. And yes, she's already bought out all the Bottle Caps at her neighborhood candy store.
IT Poet
TIMOTHY DONNELLY
AGE 34
WHY HIM? His debut collection, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, is a helluva lot more accessible than its funky title (eine lebenszeit: German for ''a lifetime''). The Brooklyn poet has a knack for buried aphorisms (''What are the traits that delineate the human?/Leave me alone'') and Byronic satire (''Fowler's mother's byzantine neuroticism/and her father's reluctance to address her directly/cast a pall over every minute of her youth...'')
BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION ABOUT POETRY ''That poetry is a delicate and nostalgic pastime with little cultural
relevance, like needlepoint.''
INFLUENCES ''My imagination is just as likely to be fed by Wilco, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or a David Lynch movie as it is by [poets] John Ashbery or Paul Muldoon.''
WORST JOBS ''My summer at a Dunkin' Donuts outside Providence. The wall of doughnuts disoriented and embarrassed me; I more or less stopped eating altogether. Also, an internship at a rare-books library in New York. When millions of dollars of illuminated manuscripts were heisted from a vault, I was suspected of the crime and had to deal with the FBI.''
BEST ADVICE ''Poetry should be at least as interesting as television.''
WORST ADVICE ''Less is more.''
