Critic David Bianculli has some thoughts about the fall season and cable's impact on network television. He says ABC may have the year's two best shows: the prime-time soap opera Desperate Housewives and the action/suspense show Lost.
Spiegelman won a Pulitzer prize for his two-part graphic novels about his father in Nazi Germany and the holocaust Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds and Maus: A Survivor's Tale: Here My Troubles Began. His new graphic nonfiction novel is about his family's experience on Sept. 11, In the Shadow of No Towers.
Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Love Wife by Gish Jen. The novel tells the story of Carnegie Wong, a second-generation Chinese American and his complicated family life.
Christopher Dickey is Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek.. His new novel, The Sleeper, is a thriller about a former terrorist living the United States who hunts down his former al Qaeda comrades after Sept. 11.
Jazz Critic Kevin Whitehead reviews new reissues of Duke Ellington recordings between 1950 and 1961: Blues in Orbit, Masterpieces By Ellington, Piano in the Background, and Piano in the Foreground.
Hersh's reporting in The New Yorker broke the story of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. His new book is Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. He won a Pulitzer prize 35 years ago when he first reported the story of the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam.
Sorry, the Web audio for this segment is unavailable due to Internet rights issues. Donovan Leitch, known for psychedelic hits such as "Mellow Yellow," is back with his first album in 8 years, Beat Cafe. Known best by his first name alone, Leitch grew up in Glasgow, and was a big part of the San Francisco music scene in the late 1960s.
The daughter of former presidential candidate, Vice President Al Gore, Kristin Gore has just written her first novel, Sammy's Hill. It's about a young health care analyst who is trying to balance her personal life with her work for a U.S. senator. Gore has been a TV writer since she graduated from Harvard, where she wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. She has written for Saturday Night Live and Futurama
In his new book, Blood and Oil, Klare argues that the United States and other world powers are jockeying to control diminishing global oil supplies. Klare is director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst.
She stars in the new film We Don't Live Here Anymore, based on a pair of short stories by Andre Dubus. Dern's acting credits include Focus, I Am Sam, October Sky, the Jurassic Park films, Wild at Heart, and Blue Velvet. She also appeared in the famous coming-out episode of the sitcom Ellen.
Journalist Wayne Slater is the co-author of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. The book, now in paperback, looks at the impact of White House senior adviser Karl Rove on President Bush. There's a new documentary based on the book.
We discuss the plans for rebuilding at ground zero in Lower Manhattan, and the debates surrounding those plans. Goldberger says idealism met cynicism at ground zero, and so far they have battled to a draw. His new book is Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York.
Commentator Geoff Nunberg considers brand names. They make up a significant proportion of the average person's vocabulary. Nunberg says the English language is being privatized.
We speak with writer-director Richard Kelly. His 2001 cult film Donnie Darko has been released in a new director's cut version. The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore and Maggie Gyllenhaal. The film mixes time-travel, coming-of age drama, sci-fi and surreal suburban angst.
Vanity Fair, based on the comic 19th century novel by William Thackeray, stars Reese Witherspoon and Gabriel Byrne. Critic David Edelstein says the supporting cast is superb, but the tone of the film is directly opposite that of the novel.
