California-born novelist and essayist, Joan Didion's work explores disorder and personal and social unrest. Her novels include Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, and The Last Thing He Wanted. Her essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are perceptive, clear-eyed analyses of American culture. With her husband, John Gregory Dunne, she wrote a number of screenplays, including A Star Is Born. Her later works of nonfiction include Political Fictions, Where I Was From, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the most recent Blue Nights.

David L. Ulin is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 2005-2010 he served as the Times' book editor. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith,, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. His essays and criticism are widely published.