The majority of professional theatre companies across the country have now canceled their performance seasons through at least the end of this year, so it appears that it will be a minimum of six…
Forty years after his death, film director Alfred Hitchcock is still known as “the master of suspense”, and his movies retain their popularity and critical acclaim. A number of his best films are…
Many of the world’s great operas have been adapted from or inspired by, classic and popular works of fiction, poetry, and drama. In some cases, an opera’s librettist follows the source material’s plot…
All of us who went through school in the United States have read at least a few American novels published before 1900. The most likely suspects are The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Tom…
Like the current year, 1920 was an eventful one for the United States. The “Spanish Influenza” epidemic of the previous two years, which we’ve heard a lot about recently, had taken 675,000 American…
At a secluded mountain lake, a young couple rent a canoe. A few hours later, the overturned canoe is discovered, and the body of a woman is found in the lake, drowned and showing evidence of head injuries. Her companion is soon arrested and charged with first-degree murder. If this...
Author and teacher Christopher Swann once heard from his parents about an unnerving incident that occurred late in the evening at their home. A young woman came to the door, on the run from a bad situation she’d found herself in, and begged them to let her in. Fortunately for...
In the course of the past thirty years, Scandinavian crime fiction has become an increasingly popular genre among English-speaking readers and television viewers, to the extent that a guidebook called Nordic Noir was published in 2013.Wendy Lesser, editor of the journal Threepenny Review, author of numerous books about literature and...
It was a crisp autumn day in 1929 when Veda Elston took three-year-old Betty to the beach to play with her new pail and shovel in the seaside Lincolnshire village of Chapel St. Leonards on England’s east coast, just a short walk from their home. After turning her attention from...
We hear a lot these days about “the 1%” -- those Americans who are wealthier than 99% of the nation’s population. Janny Scott, a New York Times reporter, who has also written a biography of Barack Obama’s mother, knows about this group from the inside, because she grew up in...
