Along with science fiction, fantasy and horror, the murder-mystery genre has retained an avid readership as mainstream "literary" fiction has receded. Indefatigable anthologist Paul Staudohar gathered a broad collection of mostly 20th-century stories into the aptly titled Murder Short & Sweet. It can't be called a representative survey, but the volume includes masters of the form beginning with Arthur Conan Doyle and ending with recent award-winners Clark Howard and Lawrence Block. Several stories have seldom been anthologized and may be out of print. Surprises include a psychologically acute piece by Agatha Christie and a crime story by Lord Dunsany, a fantasist best remembered for his influence on H.P. Lovecraft.
Remember when bands cared about albums as an art form? Instead of
slapping together a dozen tracks because, hey, they'll just end up on
everyone's iPod shuffle anyway, musicians considered how their songs
might congeal as a whole or form some sort of dram
Elvis Costello's frequent collaborator T-Bone Burnett produced Secret, Profane & Sugarcane,
an Americana-inflected album working with country and folk traditions
for images of sawdust floors set to mandolin and fiddle. Costello
intended one s
You wouldn’t expect to find T-bone and sirloin dinners at a place with stool seating and a location next to a shop hawking cell phones and cigarettes. But one of the city’s most evocatively named eateries, ZaZa Steak & Lemonade (4919 W. Capito
The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous
young woman will fall in love with them, find them sexually arousing
and long to imbibe their wisdom while sitting at their feet. That
fantasy is the spring driving Woody Allen's often-hilarious f
Away We Go, a droll comedy-cum-drama by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty),
perceptively explores the lives of more-or-less ordinary 30-somethings
lost in a world without much meaning. Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Bu
