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By STEVE PFARRER

The Sacred DogBy Joan LivingstonDarkstroke Books Franklin County author Joan Livingston, a former reporter and editor who once covered the Hilltowns for the Gazette, has used her experience to create a series of mystery novels set in similar towns,...

By STEVE PFARRER

Back in the 1980s, Jack Frisch, then in his early twenties, got bitten pretty hard by the jazz bug, taking the ferry from his home in Staten Island, New York, over to Manhattan with some friends and haunting record shops.His interest had been...

By STEVE PFARRER

AMHERST — Closed since 2019 for extensive preservation efforts and infrastructure improvements, The Evergreens, a key property at the Emily Dickinson Museum, will reopen for visitors March 1.The 19th century house was built in 1856 for Austin...

By STEVE PFARRER

When John Piskor opened his Cajun-style restaurant, Gombo Nola Kitchen & Oyster Bar, in Northampton last year, he said he eventually wanted it to turn it into something akin to a New Orleans cafe, where people come out for a drink and live music after...

By STEVE PFARRER

Dr. Khama Ennis had come a long way in her medical career.Until 2022, the Amherst resident had spent about two decades in emergency medicine, including a number of years as chief of emergency medicine at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, as...

By STEVE PFARRER

Looking for some talented older actors who can play a wide range of roles? Who have decades of experience in theater, film and television?Raye Birk and Candace Barrett Birk are at your service.The Florence couple, relatively new transplants to the...

By STEVE PFARRER

In my last column, I mentioned that The Parlor Room in Northampton and the Marigold Theater are maintaining busy schedules right through these early, dead-of-winter days.Another area venue that keeps pumping up the music is The Drake in Amherst, and...

By STEVE PFARRER

Though it had only an initial limited theatrical release, and did not appear until December, “American Fiction” has already popped up on a number of critics’ “best films of 2023” lists, and the movie has been nominated for a slew of awards.The buzz is...

By STEVE PFARRER

Ever since the November 2022 elections, politicians in over a dozen Republican-controlled states have seemed to compete with each other in attacking parts of the LGBTQ community: banning or restricting gender-affirming medical care for transgender...

By STEVE PFARRER

This past November, members of Hatchery, the teen dance troupe that’s part of Northampton’s School for Contemporary Dance & Thought, joined the Young@Heart Chorus at the elderly singers’ concert as part of a new dynamic: dancing to a number of songs...

By STEVE PFARRER

NORTHAMPTON — After a delay caused in part by the pandemic, the city has a new poet laureate.Franny Choi, who was nominated last year for a Massachusetts Book Award, has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic, and been interviewed on NPR, has...

By STEVE PFARRER

KindlingBy Kathleen JenningsSmall Beer Press Kathleen Jennings had already made a name for herself as a talented illustrator of fantasy books when she began writing her own stories some years back — and it turns out she can spin some magical tales of...

By STEVE PFARRER

When Lisa Kron was growing up in southern Michigan, her family would make an annual trek to a noted amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio — Cedar Point — one of the oldest operating amusement parks in the country, known in particular for its 16 different...

By STEVE PFARRER

Early January, just after the holidays and New Year’s Eve have run their course, can be a quiet time for a lot of music venues.But The Parlor Room in Northampton has put together a pretty jam-packed schedule right through this month, starting with a...

By STEVE PFARRER

Artists find inspiration from a number of sources. Sometimes it comes from simply living and studying outside of home.In “A Sense of Place,” a new exhibit that marks the reopening of 33 Hawley, the Northampton Community Arts Trust building, several...

By STEVE PFARRER

It’s still close enough to the end of 2023 to slip in one more “best of the year” article. In this case, it’s my list of my favorite films, given there are plenty I missed that have won acclaim. But after two-plus years of COVID-19 mostly kept me...

By STEVE PFARRER

On the U.S.-Mexican border, a desperate mother sends her young daughter alone across a bridge over the Rio Grande to try make it into Texas. In New York City, a Jewish woman confronts the hole in her heart when she thinks of her former Muslim husband,...

By STEVE PFARRER

AMHERST — After nearly 18 years at the helm of the largest art gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Loretta Yarlow will step down from the University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at the end of June.Yarlow, who came to the Valley...

By STEVE PFARRER

As Christa Whitney sees it, chance has played a big part in her life. But so has her love of history and literature. Whitney is the director of the Wexler Oral History Project at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, a program that has recorded...

By STEVE PFARRER

It might seem that every conceivable angle of studying Emily Dickinson has been covered, and in just about every format: biographies, academic studies, poetry analysis, novels, movies, even TV shows.Yet the famed Amherst poet always seems to inspire a...