A Hard-Blowing Record.

Singer/Songwriter Elvis Costello. In the late 1970s he burst out of Britain's pop-music scene with a sound and attitude never seen before. He was the angry young-man with a fresh sound. He's known for making connections between different musical communities. He's collaborated with Paul McCartney, Ruben Blades, Aimee Mann of "'til Tuesday," David Was of "Was (Not Was)," and T. Bone Burnett.

Robert Olen Butler is the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction for "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain," (Henry Holt & Co.) a collection of 15 first-person stories by Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana. Butler has written seven novels in all, several of them dealing with the Vietnamese experience, in Vietnam and in America. Butler's latest book is "They Whisper," (Henry Holt), about intimacy between a man and a woman.