Technically Dazzling and Musically Probing Pianist Garrick Ohlsson.

Writer Reynolds Price. Though Price has written books of poetry, essays and translation, he has earned his widest recognition for his novels, which work in a southern tradition depicting small towns in the 40s and 50s. His Southern Gothic tales deal with families coming together then scattering after suicides, soured romances. His 1986 novel, Kate Vaiden, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and, like Price's best fiction (A Long and Happy Life, Good Hearts), is told primarily from the point of view of a woman.

Author Terry McMillan. She's a black writer whose first novel was "Mama." Her new novel, "Disappearing Acts," is set in Brooklyn in 1982 and takes a look at what makes a relationship work. It's about an educated black man who falls in love with an uneducated black woman.

Language commentator Geoffrey Nunberg explains some of the reasons you shouldn't use a dictionary.