Photo by Andrea Bucheli

Pianist brings modern touch to a centuries-old classic

Most kids don't relish the thought of spending their entire Saturday glued to a piano bench. (It sounds like cruel, Victorian child torture if you ask me.) But that wasn't the case for Lara Downes, who grew up in San Francisco and began playing regularly at the age of 3. "I didn't know there was anything different," says Downes. "I always loved it, I never really wanted to do anything else."

Ted Heller’s poker “memoir” calls the literary world’s bluff

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Festival Cervantes

If you've read one book in Spanish, chances are it's Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The classic account of delusional heroism is taught in high schools around the country, and it’s many a Spanish-as-a-second-language student's gateway into literary art set to a foreign tongue.