Renata Adler (born October 19, 1938 in Milan, Italy) is an American author, journalist and film critic.

Adler was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. (Her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933.) After gaining a B.A. in philosophy and German from Bryn Mawr, Adler studied for an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard under I. A. Richards, before pursuing her interest in philosophy, linguistics and structuralism at the Sorbonne, where she gained a D.E.S. under the tutelage of Jean Wahl and Claude Lévi-Strauss. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University.

In 1962, Adler became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker, and in 1968-69, she served as chief film critic for the New York Times. Her film reviews were collected in her book "A Year in the Dark." She then rejoined the staff of The New Yorker, where she remained for four decades. Her reporting and essays for The New Yorker on politics, war, and civil rights were reprinted in "Toward a Radical Middle."

David Shields (born July 22, 1956) is an American author of non-fiction, fiction, and works that resist generic classification. His latest book is Jeff, One Lonely Guy (Amazon Publishing 2012), co-authored with Jeff Ragsdale and Michael Logan. Shields’s two previous books are "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto" (Knoff, 2010) and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a New York Times bestseller.^{[citation needed]}

Shields, born in Los Angeles in 1956, graduated from Brown University in 1978, Honors in English Literature, magna cum laude. In 1980 he received an MFA in Fiction from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.^{[citation needed]}

Shields’s first novel, Heroes, was published in 1984. From 1985 to 1988, he was a visiting assistant professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. In 1989, he published his second novel, Dead Languages, a book about a boy who stutters so badly that he worships words. Shields’s third book, Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories (1992), marked the beginning of his shift from traditional literary fiction toward collage, the blurring of genres, essay, and autobiography. This shift continued and deepened in such books as Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (1996), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999), and Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography (2002). Shields’s book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knoff, 2010), argues for the necessity of “reality-based art” and the obsolescence of traditional narrative. Reality Hunger was reissued in paperback by Vintage in February 2011.

Lloyd Cole (born 31 January 1961) is an English singer and songwriter, known for his role as lead singer of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions from 1984 to 1989, and for his subsequent solo work.

Cole was born in Buxton, Derbyshire. He grew up in nearby Chapel en le Frith and went to New Mills Grammar School and later attended Runshaw College in Leyland, Lancashire. After failing in Law at University College London, he later attended (but did not graduate from) the University of Glasgow, where he studied Philosophy and English and met the other members of The Commotions.

The Commotions' 1984 debut, Rattlesnakes, contained literary and pop culture references to such figures as Arthur Lee, Norman Mailer, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Simone de Beauvoir, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion. The group produced two more albums, Easy Pieces and Mainstream, before disbanding in 1989, when Cole relocated to New York to record with various artists, including Fred Maher, Robert Quine and Matthew Sweet.

This solo setting produced two acclaimed albums, Lloyd Cole in 1990 and 1991's Don't Get Weird on Me Babe. The latter was recorded in two parts: one side continued the New York rock mastered on his first solo album, while the other side featured a session orchestra, much in the style of Burt Bacharach or Scott Walker. Although some reviewers have claimed Don't Get Weird on Me Babe (the title being a quotation from the American minimalist writer Raymond Carver) to be a creative peak, it produced significantly fewer record sales. While he remained with Polydor as his record label, the US distribution contract with Capitol Records ended. (US rights were immediately picked up by Rykodisc).