Elizabeth Crane is the author of two collections of short stories: When the Messenger is Hot and All This Heavenly Glory. Her latest collection, You Must Be This Happy to Enter, is just out from Punk Planet Books. Her work has also been featured in publications including Washington Square, New York Stories, Sycamore Review, Florida Review, Eclipse, Bridge, Sonora Review, the Chicago Reader, the Believer, and McSweeney's Future Dictionary of America. Her stories have been adapted for stage and screen. She received the Chicago Public Library 21st Century Award in October 2003. Crane lives in Chicago with her husband and teaches writing at The University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute. Visit Elizabeth at www.elizabethcrane.com.

Michael Dahlie is the author of the novel A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living. His short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and Mississippi Review. He lives in New York City.

Tony D’Souza has contributed fiction and essays to The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, Salon, Outside, The O. Henry Awards, The Literary Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House and elsewhere. His feature on the Eric Volz murder trial has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, and Tony has appeared on The Today Show, Dateline, NPR and the BBC talking about the case. Tony's first novel Whiteman received the Sue Kaufman First Fiction Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Best First Fiction from Poets & Writers Magazine, the Florida Gold Medal for Fiction, and was a finalist for the LA Times First Fiction Prize and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award. Tony's second novel The Konkans is a tale of desire, adultery, corruption and fear set in Chicago and on India's Konkan Coast. Visit Tony at www.tonydsouza.com.

Salvatore Scibona’s first novel, The End, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2008. His short fiction has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Best New American Voices 2004, The Pushcart Prize XXV, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories. A former Fulbright Fellow and a graduate of St. John’s College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received grants and fellowships from the estate of James Michener, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is currently the coordinator of the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center and teaches the novel-writing class at Harvard Summer School. Visit his website at www.theendnovel.com.

—Name a technology that changed your life.

Crane: Technology is something I think about often—my grandmother lived to be 104, and she spoke often of her memory of seeing her first car (interestingly, she never got a license!), and it really strikes me that her lifetime was one of such extraordinarily major and rapid changes in technology that to live to see all that must have been something (although when I'd ask her, or my dad, who's 80 now, the reply was always slightly more than a shrug). Of course, I realize from my own experience that day-to-day, it doesn't seem so rapid, but overall, there have been some pretty remarkable changes in my lifetime as well, and trying to pick one was hard! I remember when call-waiting came out—I was a typical teenager who would agonize over a possibly-missed phone call while my heinously insensitive parents were busy tying up the line, you know, the one they were paying for. And answering machines! And VCRs! Computers, obviously, I'm just old enough to have done a long stretch as a beginning writer in the typewriter era. So in trying to think of something simpler, I was really torn between two things: the wheeled suitcase (because why in hell did it take so long to figure this out?) and the sewing machine - my final answer.

Dahlie: In the late seventies, quite astonishingly, I found myself in London attending a fairly strict school where I knew absolutely none of the things I was apparently supposed to know for my age. Among my many failings, the thing that made my American ignorance entirely unbearable to the authorities was that I had horrible penmanship. They made everyone write with a fountain pen—even in math—and this was a device that I had no idea even existed growing up in Minneapolis. Every piece of paper I touched was covered with intolerable smears and smudges. The problem was that there was no way to fake it, especially since using a so-called biro (a ball point pen) was absolutely forbidden and easily detectable. And then came the roller ball, an unbelievable way to cheat since it performed without smudging but featured what the industry heralded as the “wet ink effect.” Perhaps this technology is not appreciated in the US where there’s no such fountain pen enthusiasm, but after the roller ball, I spent considerably less time crying over my homework in the evening.

D’Souza: The Japanese bidet-toilet, or 'Washlet.' The cover opens automatically when it senses you approaching, it's got a heated seat, and of course it washes you with warm water when you are done doing le deux. And it doesn't just wash you, but the water stream pulses and sprays, it has like three settings and it goes through all of them, like a car wash. If you want an enema, it can do that, too. All that remains is to dry off, which can be accomplished with paper or a convenient hand towel.

Scibona: It would be imprecise to say that television changed my life, since it started its long campaign to smother any pleasure I might take from life before I was born. I must have heard it in utero calling to me: “Come and be sad. Sleep restlessly. Awake stupider than yesterday. Abandon hope.” But in any case it’s had a deep effect. The change came when I stopped watching it.