Kurt Andersen talks with Gregory Maguire, author of fairy tales for children and upside-down fairy tales for adults. His novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is now a blockbuster Broadway musical. He is also the author of Mirror Mirror, Confessions of an ...

Once upon a time there was a miller's daughter whose father was so proud of her, he boasted that she could spin straw into gold. Tonya Pinkins, who won the Tony Award for her role in Jelly's Last Jam, reads the 1823 translation of the classic

Christmas has its predictable signs: holiday music pumping through pharmacy loud-speakers, laser light shows on the neighbor's lawn, and the annual production of The Nutcracker. But how did a classical ballet from czarist Russia, based on a German horror story, become an American Christmas tradition? Curtis Fox asked dance scholar ...

In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini — like an evil sorcerer in a fairy tale — condemned Salman Rushdie for heresy, essentially marking the writer for death wherever he was. Rushdie left his family and went into hiding, and reached out to his young son through a new book, Haroun and ...

Stephen Gaghan’s new movie Syriana opens around the country next week. It might draw in moviegoers with the star power of George Clooney and Matt Damon, but what will stick is its provocative and disturbing plot — an intricate tale about the oil industry in the Middle East. Based in ...

This month marks the 235th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. There’s a huge shelf-ful of books about the composer, but this year Edmund Morris, the celebrated biographer of American presidents, wrote his own short life of Beethoven. Morris won the Pulitzer Prize for one of his books about Theodore ...