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...

Pure wilderness, in all its unaccountable mystery, is a state to which children are probably most susceptible. It's no surprise then that in his book, Urban Wilderness: Exploring a Metropolitan Watershed, photographer Eddee Daniels embarks on a quest to seek out the looming wilderness of his childhood. His journey along the banks of the Menomonee River is marked by a desire to reestablish an almost primordial connection with nature-to once again experience those incomprehensible stirrings of the soul...

Well, Christmas has arrived, and for some it means finding ways to keep their kids entertained through the winter break. Luckily a number of children's story times take place at venues throughout the city to help lighten the load. Starting Dec. 29, the Betty Brinn Children's Museum hosts a "Winter Workshop." At 10:30 a.m. each day through Jan. 2, children have an opportunity to make crafts and play educational games, and at 2 p.m. each day there will be a holiday-themed story time. For information on museum admission, visit www.bbcmkids.org...

To quote Mark Twain: If truth is stranger than fiction, it is only because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth is not. True Crime: An American Anthology (Library of America), edited by Harold Schechter, is an outstanding collection of ghastly American crimes ranging from Puritan times to our own day. The anthology is evidence of the gruesome possibilities that truth can reach when it comes to one human being dispatching another-or, usually, many others. Truth can also be as readable as fiction. To trot out another cliché, I could not stop at just one selection. By the end of three days, I had exhausted...

Anyone who has searched for music beyond the top of the charts has discovered wonderful worlds of talent, including many artists who should have been contenders for greater popularity. The fun in The Best Music is comparing your list of should-have-beens with the author's. Nigel Williamson and collaborators are catholic in taste, searching obscure corners of folk and prog, blues and metal, Americana and psychedelia for forgotten nuggets-at least forgotten...

With Christmas almost upon us, and the prematurely harsh weather conditions, it's no surprise that Milwaukee's seeing a dearth of author readings over the next couple of weeks. Of course, that doesn't stop the city's hardy book-loving community from organizing and attending a number of book clubs and children's story times. Among them is Milwaukee Art Museum's monthly Story Time in the Galleries on Saturday, Dec. 20, at 10:30 a.m. Children will hear a story relating to a piece of art in the museum's collection before creating a masterpiece of their own...

He does note that there is something special about the record, however, in that it was performed by a "vocal and instrumental quartet," and adds, "It's different." He is referring to it as being stylistically unique, but more specifically that it is performed by those who wrote it. A year later, on Feb. 9, 1964, millions watched the Beatles on CBS's "The Ed Sullivan Show" and rock 'n' roll stopped being singularly an American art form. In the United Kingdom, the famed Denmark Street (tantamount to America's Tin Pan Alley) commercial songwriting business was...

For many politicians and activists, "reality" is a projection of fear, desire and illusion, and nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East. Israeli novelist David Grossman argues that literature is one way of overcoming falsehood through knowing the Other-literature with fully formed human characters, free of stereotypes and impersonality, endowed with the power to surprise even their creator. To know isn't necessarily to justify, but is a way of broadening sympathy and avoiding the dehumanization of enemies. Grossman, an advocate of a just peace...

Poets are eminently resourceful. It seems they'll find inspiration anywhere: a well-shaped vase, a fertile patch of earth, even the unglamorous interior of a bus. It was while working as an office temp that Milwaukee poet and UW-Milwaukee graduate Keith Gaustad was provided with reams and reams of removable sticky paper, and it was while riding a bus that he finally figured out what to do with it. Inspired by the snatches of verse pasted to the luggage compartment, he decided to use his newfound stash to create a magazine made of poetry and prose that you could peel apart and apply anywhere...

Miles Davis was a musical Pablo Picasso. Like the painter, he was a great artist and an often unbearable person whose stardom became a magnet for the stray metallic debris of hangers-on and mindless admirers. Davis and Picasso both pushed their art forms forward in a sequence of easily demarcated periods but by the end remained famous for what they had once done, not for anything accomplished lately. One of the most revealing books on Davis allows the musician to tell his story in his own words-as chosen by interviewers as estimable as Nat Hentoff and execrable as Stephen Davis. Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters...