Culturetopia: Reliable Narrator Edition

It's books and music on this week's downloadable digest of NPR's best arts and culture stories. We've got Jonathan Franzen on "Freedom," the much-lauded novel that took him nine long years to write, Edwidge Danicat on the children's book set during the earthquake in her birthplace, Haiti; the Scissor Sisters on their first album in four years; Turkish-German filmmaker and music fan Fatih Akin on the tunes that propel his latest movie, "Soul Kitchen," set in Hamburg; and the little-known history of Nat King Cole's Spanish-language recording career.

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