(This recording contains explicit content) "Not for the fainthearted" (Sunday Times), Irvine Welsh's subterranean worlds are created with eloquent obscenity. He shot to fame with his first novel, Trainspotting, a dark comic portrait of the heroin-addicted fringe youth of 1980s Edinburgh, which was adapted into a film directed by Danny Boyle in 1996. The author of more than a dozen short story collections, screen plays, and novels, his works include Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance, Glue, Porno, and If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work. A prequel to Trainspotting, Skagboys follows Mark Renton and his cohorts in a disintegrating, drug-flooded community under Thatcher’s grim 1980s government.

Lisa Zeidner is the author of five novels, including the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Layover, about a grieving wife and mother seeking reckless anonymity in abandoned hotel rooms. Zeidner's two collections of poems include Talking Cure and Pocket Sundial, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, and her articles, personal essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Salon, and Slate. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University, Camden. Love Bomb: A Novel opens with a wedding interrupted by a woman wearing a white gown and a gas mask, a sawed-off shotgun, and a bomb trigger.