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NPR's Liane Hansen meets former CIA official Frederick Hitz at Washington, D.C.'s Spy Museum. Hitz's new book, The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage, compares spy novel secret agents with real-life operatives.

Carandiru, the new fiction film by Hector Babenco, who directed Kiss of the Spider Woman, is based on a true story of life in a notorious Brazilian prison. In 1992, conditions there spawned a riot in which over 100 inmates were killed. Minnesota Public Radio's Euen Kerr reports.

Composer Stephen Schwartz has provided the music and lyrics for Broadway hits from Godspell to his latest, Wicked. He discusses the patchwork of artistic influences, from Beethoven to Sting, that have influenced his popular, emotionally powerful style. NPR's Neva Grant reports.

A report published in the Journal of Death Studies finds that poets die younger than novelists, playwrights and other writers. James Kaufman, a researcher at California State University at San Bernardino, suggests poets may die young because they tend to be more tortured and prone to self-destruction. NPR's Bob Edwards reports.

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.

An ambitious 11-part requiem dedicated to the memory of Mr. Rogers has its premiere in Pittsburgh, where Fred Rogers lived for many years. The 21-year-old composer Luke Mayernik created the piece to honor Rogers, who died one year ago. NPR's Melissa Block talks with Mayernik.

Professor Michael Maar has unearthed an obscure 1916 short story published in German called "Lolita." It tells of a middle-aged man's fixation with a young girl. Scholars are now left to debate what it might mean if Vladimir Nabokov -- author of the later novel Lolita -- knew of the story. NPR's Liane Hansen talks with Maar.

The nominees for Best Song at Sunday's Oscar ceremonies are an eclectic mix. Two songs from Cold Mountain have been nominated, along with a song from The Lord Of the Rings: The Return of the King, Triplets of Belleville and A Mighty Wind. NPR's Scott Simon talks to American Film Institute director Murray Horwitz.

The body of actor and writer Spalding Gray was pulled out of New York's East River Sunday, two months after he was first reported missing. He was 62. Best known for a 1987 movie based on his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, Gray inspired a whole generation of performers with his groundbreaking confessional, humorous and disarming storytelling. NPR's Bob Edwards has a remembrance.