Contributors

Paris-based photographer Pascal Chevallier captures the drama and presence of opera's premier countertenors, but he thinks that "it is a pity you can't open the magazine and hear their voices."

Contributing editor Frank Deford's profile of the Phoenix Suns' Charles Barkley is V.F.'s first article on a basketball superstar. "There aren't many top players who have his flamboyance, because the best players usually take on a more imperial persona," says Deford, who has recently begun to research a new medieval mystery novel. "Maybe because Charles was never expected to be the best, and has had to fight for his respect, he can be more natural."

Sharon DeLano, an editor at Random House, had an "ecstatic experience" with two countertenors last summer during Jonathan Miller's production of L'Incoronazione di Poppea at the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York.

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V.F. special correspondent Dominick Dunne begins a series of dispatches from the O. J. Simpson front this month. He is also writing The Sins of the Sons (Crown), a novel inspired by his four-part Vanity Fair series on the Menendez killings.

Mother Teresa recently issued a statement forgiving Christopher Hitchens for Hell's Angel, his documentary about her, which aired last fall on Britain's Channel Four—an absolution for which he insists he never asked.

On the eve of an unprecedented Kandinsky exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, V.F. contributing editor John Richardson delves into the materialistic whirlwind and eventual murder of the widow of the abstract painter, a crime that "has been conveniently forgotten by everyone." This fall, Richardson will publish the second volume of his biography of Pablo Picasso.

"Brad Pitt is so protective of his privacy, he will talk about anything else to deflect attention," says Johanna Schneller of her cover-story subject, "late-night TV, the finger puppets of the Monkees he had as a kid. At first you're skeptical of his efforts, but he really gets into it."