Musicians once joked hard-driving conductor Kurt Masur had received a 'lion's kidney' transplant
Jeffrey Eugenides considered becoming a priest or monk and worked alongside Mother Teresa in India for one week during a traveling break from college.
Before conducting symphonies and operas, Jeffrey Tate was a doctor
With his complex novels on the human condition, American author Stewart O'Nan forces readers into the same moral dilemmas as his characters and asks them to find their own way out.
Though he was born in Canada, director Robert Carsen found his greatest success staging operas across Europe -- from Glyndebourne to Cologne.
Author Robert Coover says he is committed to "obsolescent print technology," but his fiction reads like a harbinger of novels to come in the era of new technology.
Louis Begley survived the Holocaust in a plot straight out of the movies. But the successful Manhattan attorney waited nearly 50 years before setting out to chronicle his breathtaking story in a semi-autobiographical novel.
For years she led a secret double life as wife and guerilla fighter in Nicaragua. Today, Gioconda Belli enjoys the fruits of literary success from her home in suburban Los Angeles.
