A Christmas Standard Reworked on the Eve of Trump
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a recent post, Hank Reichman provided a post-election playlist that did a great deal to mitigate my post-election despondency. That playlist could not have included this just released video of Fiona Apple singing a Christmas standard reworked for this particular holiday season: Whether you enjoy the song or not, Fiona…
Murder Is Our Peculiar Pastime: Fifty Notable American Crime Novels: 27-28
BY MARTIN KICH Hillerman, Tony. Skinwalkers. New York: Harper, 1986. The impact of Tony Hillerman’s novels featuring Navajo policemen Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn has had few precedents in the history of the mystery-detective genre. Although Chee and Leaphorn were not the first fictional Native American detectives, no previous novel or series featuring Native Americans…
A Playlist for the Trump Presidency
BY HANK REICHMAN Music can be an indispensable solace, inspiration, and fortification. Over the past several weeks I’ve needed all three, and I suspect others have as well. So I’ve put together this playlist to help us through the next four years. Thirty songs out of many. (Sadly, for a good number of them you’ll…
Image of the Day
Two Writing Prompts for Students (and Faculty)
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is an announcement from Prose: Dear students: The platform that brought you #Write4Good invites you to participate in a new writing challenge. This one has a chance to make literary history. Let’s take a look at the prompt: It’s record-breaking time. Together, we are going to break the world record for…
The Disappearance of Thomas Riha: An Unsolved Academic Mystery
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Russian historians of my generation may recall the name of Thomas Riha as the editor of the widely-used three-volume Readings in Russian Civilization, published in 1964 (2nd ed., 1969) by the University of Chicago Press and apparently still in print. The books were important to my own initial education in Russian…
The Age of the Crap Artist
Understanding and the Other
Murder Is Our Peculiar Pastime: Fifty Notable American Crime Novels: 25-26
BY MARTIN KICH Higgins, George V. The Friends of Eddie Coyle. New York: Knopf, 1972. In 1985, the Book Marketing Council selected The Friends of Eddie Coyle as one of the top twenty postwar American novels. Higgins’ debut effort, the novel has been translated into Danish, Finnish, Flemish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Turkish. It…