Children of the successful and famous are sometimes haunted by their parents’ achievements. Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, best known as the author of “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” and star of such movies as “My Dinner With Andre” and “The Princess Bride,” is the inheritor of an unparalleled editorial pedigree. His father, William Shawn, edited the New Yorker for almost four decades. Now he is editing his own magazine – or one issue, anyway. It’s a little magazine wittily named Final Edition.

The result is closer to the Nation than the New Yorker, though. Mr. Shawn interviews Noam Chomsky, compiles “Before the Election – Fragments from a Diary 2004,” and includes pieces by Deborah Eisenberg and Jonathan Schell, as well as poems by Mark Strand. Seven Stories Press has jointly published it and priced it at $10. In his “From the Editor” dated October 1, Mr. Shawn writes, “In confusing times and bad times, it seems natural to collect around oneself a group of friends and people one trusts, to try to figure things out. So that’s what this is.”

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DISCMEN Another relatively new magazine, Paste, has made the unusual determination to include a DVD with every issue of its publication. Paste, “one of the fastest growing independently published music magazines in the country,” included in its December/January “special film issue” a “DVD sampler” containing nearly four hours of music videos (Norah Jones, Elvis Costello, R.E.M), film clips, film trailers (“Lemony Snicket’s ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events'” starring Jim Carrey), and short films. There’s also a sister “music sampler CD” including songs by Alison Krauss and Union Station, among others.

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LISTEN TO THE NOVEL When we got an early copy of the novel “Misfortune” by Wesley Stace, we were surprised to see that it also included a CD. It turns out, Wesley Stace is the musician known as John Wesley Harding, who has toured with Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen. On the CD Mr. Stace, who is something of a Laurence Sterne enthusiast/scholar, sings three songs and accompanies himself on the fiddle. “I was born with a coat hanger in my mouth, / Oh yeah, and I was dumped down south,” he sings. He also reads passages from this debut novel, described as “Dickensian” by publisher Little, Brown.

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NOTES Paris-based Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn has won the 2004 Joseph Beuys Prize and 50,000 Swiss Francs ($43,460). The prize is presented by the Joseph Beuys Foundation to artists whose works “inhabit the Conceptual Universe of Joseph Beuys.” … Frick Collection chief curator Colin B. Bailey has received the 2004 Mitchell Prize and $1,000 for his book, “Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris” (Yale University Press). … Manhattan’s Museum of Arts & Design, formerly known as the American Craft Museum, has named Dorothy Twining Globus as curator and Carolyn Cohen as development officer. Ms. Globus comes from the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, where she worked for 20 years. … The American University in Cairo, Egypt, has awarded the Naguib Mahfouz medal for literature to the Iraqi novelist Alia Mamdouh, for her fifth novel, “Al-Mahbubat” (“The Loved Ones”), first published in 2003 by Saqi Books.