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Commentary by Alexandra du Bois, a student at Indiana University and the winner of the first "Composers Under 30" Competition. The Kronos Quartet will be playing the piece she wrote for them at some of their concerts this season.

Elia Kazan, director of the original Broadway productions of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, dies at the age of 94. Kazan also won Oscars for his film-directing work, including On the Waterfront. But he was villified by many of his colleagues for 1952 congressional testimony that identified Hollywood figures as communist sympathizers.

NPR's Scott Simon talks with Daniel Pinkwater, the Weekend Edition Saturday ambassador to the world of children's literature. This time, they discuss one of Pinkwater's own books: The Picture of Morty and Ray, illustrated by Jack E. Davis.

Just in time for Mother's Day, participants in the StoryCorps national oral history project make special recordings with, and for, their moms. Hear a sampling of the conversations recorded in a booth at New York City's Grand Central Terminal.

Think 1950s food and you might conjure up Jell-O salads with a riot of add-ons or soda pop put to unnatural uses. In her new book, Something from the Oven, Laura Shapiro deconstructs food from the '50s -- and the industry that foisted it on American households. Shapiro talks with NPR's Melissa Block.

Rachel Cohen's book A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 describes encounters -- sometimes fleeting, sometimes influential -- between such luminaries as Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, for example, or Richard Avedon and James Baldwin. Hear NPR's Liane Hansen and Cohen.

Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho is a household name in most parts of the world. His new novel, Eleven Minutes, was a global best seller last year -- everywhere but the United States. Now Coelho is setting his sights on the American literary market, which remains stubbornly indifferent to foreign best sellers. NPR's Martin Kaste reports.

In her new work Safe in Hell, now on stage in Southern California, playwright Amy Freed renders the Salem witch trials as black comedy. The play centers around the dysfunctional relationship between two historic figures involved in the 17th-century trials: moralist Increase Mather and his son, Cotton. Freed talks with NPR's Renee Montagne.

NPR's Liane Hansen speaks with clinical psychologist and sociologist Thomas J. Cottle, author of When the Music Stopped: Discovering My Mother (SUNY Press). Cottle's mother, Gitta Gradova , was an established concert pianist of the 1920's and 30's, and she relished her budding career and rubbed elbows with the musical greats of the day. She gave it up to raise a family, and her son contends it led her into depression.

NPR's Scott Simon talks to author Daniel Silva about his new novel A Death in Vienna. The former journalist, now a prolific writer, brings back his hero, Gabriel Allon, a European art restorer who hunts down Nazi criminals who have escaped justice. (The book is published by G.P. Putnam & Sons.)