Arts

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McCann, Stiles Win National Book Awards

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Nov. 19, 2009 | Lynn Neary | National Public Radio | 0 comments

The 60th annual National Book Awards were handed out Wednesday night in New York. Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, a novel about daring, luck and mortality in 1970s New York, won the fiction prize. T.J. Stiles' biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, was the nonfiction winner and Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy won for poetry.

100 years of Johnny Mercer, pop poet laureate

 Nov. 18, 2009 | Jeff Lunden | NPR | 0 comments

He wrote the words, and sometimes the music, for more than 1,500 songs, among them "Skylark," "Blues in the Night" and "Moon River." He had a few hits himself on Capitol Records — which he started. He was a great American lyricist, and today is marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Sexing up the PG-13 vampire ... but not too much

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Nov. 18, 2009 | Beth Accomando | NPR | 0 comments

New Moon, the second movie installment in the hit Twilight saga, opens this Friday. With a target audience of teen and tween girls, the films straddle the line between sexy and chaste. Some fans say this can send mixed messages.

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