September 01, 2006
This summer, the literary world experienced a-star-is-born moment when 28-year old novelist Marisha Pessl's debut Special Topics in Calamity Physics received rave reviews and flew up the New York Times Best-Seller list. Kurt Andersen talks with Pessl about the inspiration behind her teenage heroine Blue Van Meer and how Pessl started writing.
Why do paintings cost what they cost? Who makes the decision that one work of art sells for thousands or millions while another one sells for hundreds of dollars...or not at all? Sarah Elzas went looking for answers along New York's art gallery food chain, her first stop was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
It used to be that if you were a playwright and you wanted to publish the script of your play, you had to go with one of two very old firms -- Samuel French or Dramatists Play Service. But now all of that's changed, thanks to a new company called Playscripts. Kurt Andersen talks with Douglas and Jonathan Rand, the two brothers who started the company when they were students, about how they're bringing the business of theater into the 21st century.
In 1970, Vashti Bunyan thought she was on the verge of becoming a star. She hit the pop charts a few years back with a song penned by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. She poured her heart and soul into a debut album of folk music -- but the album was a commercial and critical failure. Devastated, Vashti moved to the countryside and focused on raising her family. Meanwhile, a handful of influential folk singers in the U.S. were listening to her supposed flop -- and over the next 30 years, Vashti's music was taking a journey of its own.
William Christenberry returns every year to central Alabama near Tuscaloosa to chronicle the very slowly morphing rural landscape of his childhood: faded wooden barns, kudzu, covered buildings, dilapidated roadside markets with rusty signs and a certain old barbecue joint. Kurt Andersen asks Christenberry how he avoids cliches while capturing such familiar images of the South
Studio 360 is a co-production of
Public
Radio International and
WNYC New York Public Radio, and is funded in part by
Ken and Lucy Lehman, the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and
DK Eyewitness Travel. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our series on Underground Heroes is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 
