Dale Wasserman had more trouble getting it on to a Broadway stage than Don Quixote ever had with those windmills.

In a class for the newly deaf, former musician Simon meets G and his quest to create an entirely new form of music helps him better understand her, himself, and his relationship to the hearing world.

As editor of the Guardian, one of the world's foremost newspapers, Alan Rusbridger abides by the relentless twenty-four-hour news cycle. But increasingly in midlife, he feels the gravitational pull of music—especially the piano. He sets himself a formidable challenge: to fluently learn Chopin's magnificent Ballade No. 1 in G minor, arguably one of the most difficult Romantic compositions in the repertory. With pyrotechnic passages that require feats of memory, dexterity, and power, the piece is one that causes alarm even in battle-hardened concert pianists. He gives himself a year. Under ideal circumstances, this would have been a daunting task. But the particular year Rusbridger chooses turns out to be one of frenetic intensity. As he writes in his introduction, "Perhaps if I'd known then what else would soon be happening in my day job, I might have had second thoughts. For it would transpire that, at the same time, I would be steering the Guardian through one of the most dramatic years in its history." It was a year that began with WikiLeaks' massive dump of state secrets and ended with the Guardian's revelations about widespread phone hacking at News of the World. "In between, there were the Japanese tsunami, the Arab Spring, the English riots . . . and the death of Osama Bin Laden," writes Rusbridger. The test would be to "nibble out" twenty minutes per day to do something totally unrelated to the above. Rusbridger's description of mastering the Ballade is hugely engaging, yet his subject is clearly larger than any one piece of classical music. Play It Again deals with focus, discipline, and desire but is, above all, about the sanctity of one's inner life in a world dominated by deadlines and distractions. What will you do with your twenty minutes?

Accompanying audio CD features some of Schifrin's compositions: Mission : impossible (from Firebird), Sketches of Miles (from More jazz meets the symphony), Tango del atardecer (from Letters from Argentina), Ins and outs (from Ins and Outs and Lalo live at the Blue Note), Montuno (from Latin jazz suite), Shifting gears (from Bullitt), Kyrie (from Jazz mass), Charlie Parker : the firebird (from Firebird), and Tocata (from Gillespiana).

A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of micro-fiction. A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of microfiction, César Aira–the author of at least eighty novels, most of them barely one hundred pages long–The Musical Brain & Other Stories comprises twenty tales about oddballs, freaks, and loonies. Aira, with his fuga hacia adelante or "flight forward" into the unknown, gives us imponderables to ponder and bizarre and seemingly out-of-context plot lines, as well as thoughtful and passionate takes on everyday reality. The title story, first published in the New Yorker, is the creme de la creme of this exhilarating collection.

With dino-sized determination and a dash of imagination, Cera the Triceratops discovers she can do the "impossible."

In 1971, Ted Chapin was a production assistant on the legendary Broadway musical Follies. Thirty years later, the journal he kept has become the definitive history of one of Broadway's greatest-ever musicals, created by geniuses at the top of their free: Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, Michael Bennett, and James Goldman.