More New Recordings from the Most Exciting Contemporary Soviet Composer.

Naturalist, explorer and writer Peter Matthiessen. For over three decades he's been writing critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction includes the books The Tree Where Man Was Born, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and The Snow Leopard, which won that award. He's also written several novels, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord, also nominated for the National Book Award, and Far Tortuga.

Writer and shopper Paul Rudnick, and his mother, Selma. Paul Runick, best-known for his play Poor Little Lambs, for the novel Social Disease, and for his essays in such publications as Esquire and Vanity Fair, has just published a novel about, among other things, a mother and son shopping team. Titled I'll Take It, the thinly veiled autobiographical novel is about the developed inability to resist the temptation to shop, and about the quest for ultimate bliss - a good sale.

Television critic David Bianculli reviews "The Neon Empire" a new mini-series on Showtime which stars Martin Landau, Gary Busey, and Ray Sharkey. It follows in the footsteps of NBC's belated "Crime Story."