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Actress Patricia Clarkson is making waves -- and winning fans -- for her sharp-edged interpretation of Blanche DuBois in a Kennedy Center production of A Streetcar Named Desire. NPR's Liane Hansen talks with Clarkson.

The principal cellist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic is celebrating the return of his missing 320-year-old cello. The $3.5 million Stradivarius was stolen from his front porch three weeks ago. Footage from a surveillance camera shows a man on a bicycle riding off with it. A nurse who found the instrument in a garbage dumpster could collect a $50,000 reward. NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports.

French arts performers plan to strike as the Cannes Film Festival gets under way Wednesday in France. Actors, dancers, electricians and cameramen say government reforms have cut some of their unemployment benefits. Festival organizers scrambling to make sure the event is not shut down. NPR's Renee Montagne reports.

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.