Culturetopia: Must-Listen Arts & Entertainment (Nondisclosure Edition)

Loads of literature in this week's podcast of NPR's best arts stories, but we start with a Treme-splosion. The creator of HBO's The Wire talks about his new series, set in New Orleans's Treme neighborhood, with actor Clarke Peters and Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep.

Biographer Kitty Kelley dishes about her hot-off-the-presses, unauthorized biography of Oprah Winfrey, Queen of All Media. (Oprah wouldn't speak to her, but Kelley says she interviewed about 850 people, including Oprah's relatives. She publishes pictures of herself with them in the book for proof.)

We've also got interviews with prolific detective writer Walter Mosley, who describes his latest book as being set in a "meta-racial state" as opposed to a "post-racial America," and with Ian McEwan, whose latest novel was inspired by an Arctic sea voyage meant to raise awareness of climate change. (He promises it's not preachy.)

Florence Welch, of the band Florence and the Machine, has a primal growl of a voice when she sings, but Linda thinks when she's speaking in her interview on All Things Considered, Welch sounds like a little cartoon mouse. (I think more like a cartoon talking teacup.) Either way, Welch lives up to the hype that's been gusting our way from Britain, where her debut album, Lungs, was a sensation.

And we bid farewell to a British sensation of a different kind -- promoter and provocateur Malcolm McLaren, the inventor of the Sex Pistols.

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