Throughout his career in neurology, Dr. Oliver Sacks has encountered myriad patients who are struggling to cope with debilitating medical conditions. While their ailments vary, many have one thing in common: an appreciation for the therapeutic effects of music. Dr. Sacks's latest book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, explores what music can tell us about our minds. NOVA's new show follows the BBC's Alan Yentob on an intercontinental quest—from New York to England and Ireland—to meet individuals like those chronicled in Musicophilia, bringing Sacks's latest work to life through their intimate and phenomenal stories. The original PBS broadcast date will be June 23, but check your local listings for repeat air times. Click here for more information and a video extra about the program.

Alice Munro is the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. The prize is awarded once every two years to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage. Munro's latest collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, will be published this fall by Knopf. Her previous books can be found here. Judge Jane Smiley says, "Her work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise. Her thoughtfulness about every subject is so concentrated." She will be presented with a trophy and a check for £60,000 at a ceremony at Trinity College in Dublin on June 25th.

Cormac McCarthy has won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. McCarthy received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road (Vintage), and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men (Vintage) was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Click here for more titles by Cormac McCarthy.

Donald Ray Pollack has won the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers, which honors a fiction writer of a first novel or collection of short stories, for Knockemstiff (Doubleday).

Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday), was a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

Sam Shepard received The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Drama Master Playwright Award.

Random House, Inc. books were awarded 2009 Pulitzer Prizes in three of the five book categories:

Fiction
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

Biography
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)

General Nonfiction
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)

Finalists included Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by H.W. Brands (Doubleday) for Biography, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, by Arthur Herman (Bantam Books) for General Nonfiction and This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust (Alfred A. Knopf) in the History category.

Click here for more information about the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.

Random House is offering, for a limited-time-only, a completely free download of the book Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas.

In addition to the full text of the book, the free download also includes: a letter and two essays from the author, a Teacher's/Discussion Guide for Funny in Farsi and an excerpt from Firoozeh's latest book Laughing Without An Accent.

Click here now to download your free copy!