Writer Stewart O'Nan has nearly 20 works of fiction and nonfiction to his credit, but his name isn't too well known beyond a community of loyal readers and independent-bookstore prowlers.
But book critic Maureen Corrigan predicts that O'Nan's literary celebrity will grow in the wake of his latest book, Last Night at the Lobster. It's a little book, she says, that's making a big splash.
Fresh Air's critic at large tells us why he loves the high-fashion challenge Project Runway, a reality-TV staple now in its fourth season on cable's Bravo channel. Among other things, it's one reality show that's about something more interesting than forcing its contestants to eat bugs.
Obligatory Villagers, the new jazz- and cabaret-inflected album from singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, features sassy tracks that touch on topics as diverse as feminism and zombies.
McKay, a sometime actress and stand-up comedian, made a splash in 2004 with a debut CD called Get Away From Me — a play on the title of Norah Jones' album Come Away With Me.
Last year, she co-starred in a revival of Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera alongside Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper.
McKay joins Terry Gross for a Fresh Air concert and conversation.
Say "Christopher Plummer," and some people automatically think of The Sound of Music, in which he played the Baron von Trapp.
But that's just one of about 100 films Plummer has been in; recent highlights from his big-screen career include Syriana, The Insider, A Beautiful Mind, and Inside Man. He's also had long stage career, won two Tony Awards, and performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks has recently returned from Iraq — where senior military commanders now say that the key threat facing the U.S.effort isn't terrorists, it's the intransigence of the Shia-dominated government.
Ricks, a regular Fresh Air guest, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the best-selling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.
Writer-director Todd Haynes is responsible for an eclectic array of films, from the elegantly bio-paranoia drama Safe to the glam-rock celebration Velvet Goldmine and the Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven.
His latest experiment: I'm Not There, a kind of fantasia on the public personas of Bob Dylan. Six different actors — including Cate Blanchett — play the famously protean singer.
Journalist Philip C. Winslow has worked for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, ABC radio and CBC radio.
But he hasn't always been a journalist: His new memoir, Victory for Us Is to See You Suffer, chronicles the time he spent working with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the West Bank. It was during the second Palestinian intifada, during which Winslow transported aid across checkpoints to villages and refugee camps.
Pro golfer John Daly has won tournaments on five continents, including two of the PGA tour's four majors. He's also gambled away a couple of fortunes, trashed various hotel rooms, houses and cars, married four times, and downed enough booze to land himself in a string of emergency rooms and rehab clinics. These days, he says, he lives on Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights. "I guess you could say," Daly writes in his recent memoir, that "I'm not exactly a poster boy for moderation."
Over the course of eight years, Matthew Diffee has had more than 100 of his illustrations published in the cartoonists' bible, The New Yorker.
But that magazine gets more than 500 submissions a week — and for each issue, the editors select only 20 cartoons, in a process that Diffee says may or may not involve the use of darts.
So even Diffee has had to deal with rejection. Happily, he's found a channel: His new book, featuring his own work and that of 37 other New Yorker regulars, is The Rejection Collection, Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap.
Jerry Williams, Jr. has been calling himself Swamp Dogg for close to 40 years, but his career goes back even longer than that. He's one of America's most eccentric musicians, and today rock historian Ed Ward tries to get a handle on the many faces of a songwriter, producer and performer who's made a career out of popping up where you least expect him.
Our guest, Father John Barkemeyer, left a parish on Chicago's South Side to become an Army chaplain in 2003, the year U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq. There's a shortage of Catholic priests in the Army, and for much of his current tour in Iraq, Barkemeyer has been the service's only Catholic chaplain in the province of Anbar.
Brian De Palma's films include the horror classic Carrie, the crime epics Scarface and The Untouchables, and the first Mission: Impossible film.
His latest release, Redacted, is a fictional take on a real incident — in which U.S. soldiers who raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl in Iraq. It has strong echoes of his Vietnam War drama Casualties of War.
Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, creators of Thirtysomething and executive producers of My So-Called Life, are making news again with a new series.
It's called Quarterlife, and it's airing not on TV, but in short, six-to-an-hour episodes on the Web. Some pundits are touting it as an alternative for audiences during the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike.
Critic David Bianculli, who's working on the Web himself now at TVWorthWatching.com, has a review.
In a new book, two British investigative journalists dig into the story of Pakistan's clandestine nuclear network — and America's role not just in condoning its ally's nuclear ambitions, but aiding them.
Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark are senior correspondents for the Guardian newspaper; both previously worked for the Sunday Times of London.
Their book is titled Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons.
Norman Mailer's work combined sweeping cultural criticism, erudition and obscenity.
Mailer's 60-year career was full of depth and controversy. The novelist, who died Nov. 10, was often deliberately provocative, says book critic Maureen Corrigan.
And though he made perhaps his strongest impact as an essayist and journalist, Mailer wanted to be remembered as a novelist.
Author Robert Kuttner writes in The Squandering of America that many of the economic policies and regulations established during the New Deal have since been replaced by a more business-friendly free market system. Kuttner is the founder and co-editor of The American Prospect.
Norman Mailer once wrote that before he was 17, he'd formed the desire to be a major writer. That wish certainly came true. One political campaign, two Pulitzer Prizes and an unprecedented level of controversy later, he became a literary grandee unlike any other. This interview originally aired on Oct. 8, 1991.
