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Thursday night marks the end of the NBC hit show Friends. After 10 seasons of widespread popularity, the comedy will now be seen only on syndicated reruns. NPR's Robert Siegel talks with James Poniewozik of Time magazine.

Alan Cheuse reviews Little Black Book of Stories, by English writer A.S. Byatt. Three of the five stories included in the collection touch on the weird, the ghostly, and the miraculous.

As part of an occasional series titled, "Musicians in their Own Words," organist Paul Jacobs discusses his upcoming marathon performance. On Saturday, Jacobs will perform all nine hours of Olivier Messiaen's complete organ works. Features in the series are produced by David Schulman and NPR's Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr.

As a child, writer Sandra Cisneros turned to fairy tales to escape from her run down surroundings. Their highly stylized language inspired her own distinct literary voice, which blends Spanish-language rhythms and cadences into English to tell stories of a cross-cultural world. For Intersections, a series on artists' influences, Cisneros tells NPR's Felix Contreras how she finds inspiration in the collision of languages.

Noi is a new film from Iceland about a disaffected Albino high school student. The film blends comedy and tragedy in its approach to its subject. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan has a review.

NPR's Liane Hansen has the second half of her conversation with the authors of two new books on the use of American power in the world. Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of Financial History at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He's the author of Colossus: The Price of America's Empire. Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. His new book is Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk.

An unidentified buyer paid $104.1 million Wednesday for a Pablo Picasso painting sold at Sotheby's in New York -- a record price for a work of art sold at auction. "Boy with a Pipe" was painted in 1905 and dates from Picasso's Rose Period. Hear NPR's Steve Inskeep and reporter David D'Arcy.

NPR's Susan Stamberg visits writer Andrew Sean Greer in San Francisco to talk about his new novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli.

Ann Patchett has written a memoir of her friendship with the late writer Lucy Grealy, who died from facial bone cancer in 2002. Grealy wrote about surviving the pain of her treatments -- surgeries and chemotherapy -- in Autobiography of a Face. Patchett writes about Grealy's courage and her love of life in Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. NPR's Melissa Block talks with Patchett.

Alan Cheuse reviews Symptomatic, by Danzy Senna, a novel about a young California woman of mixed race who falls into a psychic tug of war with a colleague in New York City. It is published by Riverhead Books.