Arts

Host Eleanor Bobrow welcome Edie Weinstein to the program, author of The Bliss Mistress: Guide to Transforming the Ordinary into the Extraordinary.

I was baffled by the cover of The New York Times Magazine two Sundays ago. You may remember that the headline of the cover story was: "George Saunders Has Written The Best Book You'll Read This Year." I was baffled because the only George Saunders I could think of was that old movie star who was always playing cads in films like Rebecca and All About Eve.

At Sunday's Golden Globes, Ben Affleck looked genuinely surprised and delighted twice toward the end of the evening: first when he won best director for Argo, and then again when the film won for best motion picture/drama.

The film, which Affleck produced and in which he also stars, is the mostly true story of the CIA operative who helmed the rescue of six U.S. diplomats who managed to escape at the outset of the 1979 Iran crisis that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days after militants took over the American Embassy in Tehran.

Fiction and nonfiction releases from Vladimir Nabokov, Karen Thompson Walker, Toby Wilkinson, Alec Wilkinson and William J. Broad.

Copyright 2013 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.