Arts Audio/Video - NPR

The latest installment of Edmund White's biography remembers gay life in 1960s and '70s New York.

This collection — edited by Peter Straub — draws from 300 years of American horror and fantasy.

Media magnate Oprah Winfrey recently announced plans to end her "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in 2011, after 25 seasons. In a tearful message to viewers on Friday, Winfrey promised the top-rated program's final leg would be one to remember. Guest host Jennifer Ludden talks reporter Marcus Leshock, of WGN-TV and blogger for "Chicago Now." Leshock recently posted a blog, speculating who might be the final guest for Winfrey's last program.

Director Wes Anderson has worked on a lot of film projects, but with his latest film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, he ventured into new territory: animation. Anderson says that making a stop-motion picture is the most involved filmmaking he's ever done, but he also says that the process has "a sort of magic."

The winners from National Geographic's International Photography Contest will be announced in early December, but viewers have been voting on their favorites for the past few weeks. View a selection of a "viewer's choice" photographs.

400 years of poems, essays and stories about coming to America, edited by Ilan Stavans.

Nearly 100 stories from the celebrated author of Crash and Empire of the Sun.

The name Orson Welles has the power to jog millions of memories. His radio work sent the nation into a panic. Host Liane Hansen speaks with Chris Welles Feder about her new book, In My Father's Shadow, an account of her life growing up as the daughter of Orson Welles.

Dr. Chris Coppola was a pediatrician in the U.S. before he shipped off to Iraq. As a military surgeon, he expected to treat soldiers, but he found himself helping war-ravaged Iraqi children as well. Host Liane Hansen speaks with Dr. Coppola about his memoir, Coppola: A Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq.

Its alluring crimson fruit makes it an enduring star of the Thanksgiving centerpiece, but Asiatic bittersweet is strangling trees across New England. In many states, it's illegal to collect or move the invasive vine.

The stars of The Big Bang Theory are two fictional Caltech physicists, but the physics problems they study are real. Bill Prady, the program's co-creator and executive producer, talks about including real-world science in the script, from dark matter to magnetic monopoles.

The star of Milk and Pineapple Express — and a little movie franchise called Spider-Man — will be spending some time in Port Charles over the next couple of months. His guest-starring stint may help "freshen the image of daytime," says the soap opera's executive producer.

Judd Apatow, known for films like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, was the guiding force behind the comedy Funny People, out now on DVD. The movie focuses on a comedian (Adam Sandler) who reassesses his life after a dire medical diagnosis. Apatow, a former comic himself, talks about why he made the movie — and what he finds funny.

By Claire O'Neill Tim Burton is probably the only person who could get away with using a monster's mouth as the entrance to an art exhibition. You know him for his films Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of all film director-pr...

America's Finest News Source has released a book celebrating its 21 years of satire (with a wink). Onion editors Joe Randazzo and Joe Garden talk with Renee Montagne about the serious business of being funny. Also: See the fun The Onion has had at NPR's expense.

Any short list of important young American playwrights would have to include Sarah Ruhl, who at age 35 has had work performed at major theaters around the country. She made her Broadway debut Nov. 19, with a period drama called In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play. But as Jeff Lunden reports, it's as much about intimacy and honesty as about sexuality.

In an NPR tradition, the Friday before Thanksgiving is the time for Susan Stamberg to share her weird-sounding — but delicious — recipe for cranberry relish. This year, she's found a real fan: food expert Ruth Reichl.

Brace yourself: Things are about to get meta. Pedro Almodovar's latest picture strings a colorfully knotty love story across layers of dark film-within-a-film intrigue. Complex of plot, deft in its blending of comedy and melodrama, and a treasure trove of golden-age movie references, the film is what you might call a lushly tragic lark — a heartfelt, if not quite heartbreaking, paean to romance and to the romance of cinema. (Recommended)

"A man without a gun, that's not a man," says the pain-wracked, drug-addled anti-hero cop at the center of Port of Call: New Orleans. You get the feeling that director Werner Herzog, that dedicated chronicler of alpha-male lunacy, agrees — and you can't help but notice that his crime drama is every bit as over-the-top eccentric as its protagonist.

The talk-show icon will call it a wrap after 25 seasons, her production company said. A formal announcement is expected on Friday's edition of The Oprah Winfrey Show.

The director of Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II returns to his Hong Kong-cinema roots with a battle epic based on a war fought in China 18 centuries ago. Critic Mark Jenkins says that while Red Cliff's scope is certainly impressive, the edited-down U.S. release could use some psychological strife to go with its clanging swords and clashing ships.

If you have teenage girls in your life, you don't need to be told that New Moon, the second part of The Twilight Saga, hits movie theaters this weekend. Even though the world may have had enough of star-crossed sweethearts Edward and Bella by the series' end, critic Kenneth Turan says there's not enough of them in this installment.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) has proposed reading the 2,074-page Senate health care bill on the floor of the Senate. Floyd King, a veteran actor for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, performs a dramatic reading of a section of the bill.

The 60th annual National Book Awards were handed out Wednesday night in New York. Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, a novel about daring, luck and mortality in 1970s New York, won the fiction prize. T.J. Stiles' biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, was the nonfiction winner, and Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy won for poetry.

When Ayon committed suicide in 1999, she was just 32 years old — and already a star in the Cuban art world. A major exhibit of her work now under way in Havana has revived an enduring mystery in Cuba — about art, African myths and the shadowy, all-male secret society known as Abakua.

Has Google joined the ranks of the best street photographers? Jon Rafman might argue so, and he has a collection of Google Street View photos to make the case.

President Obama ruffled conservative feathers when he bowed to the Japanese emperor during his trip to Asia. Bowing is the standard greeting in Japan, as it once was in the United States. Slate magazine's Andy Bowers explains the history of the gesture and why it feel out of favor in the U.S.

It's been all Palin all the time ever since the former Alaska governor unveiled her memoir on Oprah on Monday. Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard comes to Palin's defense in his new book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star.

Crime writer Randy Wayne White spent 13 years as a tackle fishing guide before he began to probe the mysteries of southwest Florida. White is best known for his series of crime novels featuring Doc Ford, an NSA agent turned marine biologist living on Florida's Gulf Coast.

Lyricist and composer Johnny Mercer — born Nov. 18, 1909 — wrote or co-wrote more than 1,000 songs, including American Songbook standards like "Skylark," "That Old Black Magic" and "Come Rain or Come Shine." His Academy Awards tally includes a statue for what's possibly his most famous tune, "Moon River." Fresh Air marks the anniversary of his birth with an in-studio concert starring Rebecca Kilgore and Dave Frishberg.

By Claire O'Neill How do you think these ghostly photographs were made? This slideshow requires version 9 or higher of the Adobe Flash Player. Get the latest Flash Player. 'xrays' ...

New Moon, the latest movie in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight vampire saga, is sucking in marketers, who are using the franchise's characters to sell everything from bottled water to late-model luxury cars.

The New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year can trace its origins back to the 17th century. The word: "unfriend." Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer at Oxford University Press, says the Oxford English Dictionary provides a citation for "unfriend" from 1659.

Sarah Palin may be the Republican party's next big hope, but commentator Rod Dreher says her new book, Going Rogue, does little to bolster her image. She may be the perkiest small-town American in the spotlight, but Palin is selling her personality, not a platform.

Washington, D.C. has been talking for weeks about a performance New Yorkers are still waiting to see: Cate Blanchett's Blanche DuBois. Now the Oscar-winning actress and passionate anti-global warming activist sits down for a talk with Diane Rehm.

When Sacha Baron Cohen grants an interview, it's usually in character — as Borat, the clueless faux-Kazakh journalist; or as Bruno, the outrageously shallow, ostentatiously gay Austrian fashionista at the center of Cohen's most recent film. Today, though, Cohen joins Fresh Air as himself, for a conversation with Terry Gross and Bruno director Larry Charles.