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Novelist Geraldine Brooks, poet Robert Hass, Western essayist William Kittredge: from critic Alan Cheuse, an array of books to keep winter's chill and the ever-earlier dark at bay — at least in the circle of light by the reader's chair.

Jerry Seinfeld's animated comedy centers on an amusing honeybee who talks a lot about nothing, then quits work — whereupon the world gets dreary until he starts up again. It's a fairly personal vision — and a bit of a drone.

Matthew Diffee contributes regularly to the cartoonists' bible, The New Yorker. But that magazine gets more than 500 submissions a week — and publishes only 20 cartoons in each issue. Diffee's new book, featuring his work and that of other New Yorker regulars, is The Rejection Collection, Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap.

Fresh Air's critic at large tells us why he loves the high-fashion challenge, a reality-TV staple now in its fourth season on cable's Bravo channel.

Our cultural concierge, Jesse Kornbluth, urges revisiting the 1983 comedy, Local Hero. The soundtrack of this overlooked film – about Scottish villagers who thwart an American oil company's efforts to buy their land — is just as entertaining as the premise.

Fresh Air's arbiter of things filmic offers his annual year-end movies wrap-up. This time, his Top 10 list has 11 entries, as the number-nine slot features a tie. At the top: Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

From Darth Vader to Scarlett O'Hara, the best fictional characters reflect something about who we are and how we got here. In Character, a six-month series from NPR, explores indelible American characters from fiction, folklore and pop culture.

Like the early Coen Brothers films Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing, this thriller is a genre exercise — controlled, precise and exquisite in its imagery as it makes an audience cringe.

Set in Texas in the 1980's, the film No Country for Old Men narrates a chase for stolen drug money. It's the latest from brother filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, whose films have always had violence as a theme. But this new movie is darker and more violent than ever before.

Josh Brolin, who plays laconic Llewelyn Moss in the much-praised new Coen Brothers thriller No Country for Old Men, talks about his appetite for surprising characters and working with the filmmaking brothers.