Jennifer Higdon recently won the Pulitzer Prize for her musical compositions, yet she didn't pick up a musical instrument - a pawn-shop flute her mother brought home - until she was fifteen. Higdon tells Kurt that her childhood home was more steeped in the Beatles than ...

Today, no one would say that a woman can't be a writer. But when the Chilean-born novelist Isabel Allende was growing up, "writer" was not on the career menu. Kurt asks Allende about the path that led her to write fiction. Her newest novel, Island Beneath ...

To make a convincing zombie, it's all in the pacing. George Romero invented the modern zombie with his 1968 film, "Night of the Living Dead," and he still likes them old-fashioned - slow-moving but hard to stop. But Ruben Fleischer, director of the ...

In the MFA program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, artist Komail Aijazuddin and his friend from Lahore, Salman Toor, have done something they've never seen in Pakistan. They use the techniques from Western art to paint Islamic stories and Pakistani subjects. Produced by

Ben Greenman's book, Please Step Back, now out in paperback, appears to be a biography of the 1970s soul and funk legend Rock Foxx. But Foxx is totally imaginary. So Greenman teamed up with a real-life funk legend, Swamp Dogg, to release one ...