Suddenly I saw a pale gray shape dart in front of my car. At first I thought it was just a large dog, thin and long-legged. Trapped between the high wall on the left and the unbroken row of parked cars to the right, the animal ran at a relaxed canter directly down the center of the road a few feet in front of me. I slowed even more. The beast was caught in the headlights and I saw it was no neighborhood pooch out for a midnight stroll. It was a coyote and it was hunting.

"A one-of-a-kind treat from the golden age."— Kirkus Reviews From music conductor turned crime fiction novelist, Sebastian Farr, comes an epistolary tour de force that hits the perfect murderous crescendo for music and crime fiction aficionados alike. During a performance of Strauss' tone poem 'A Hero's Life', the obnoxious conductor, Sir Noel Grampian, is shot dead in full view of the Maningpool Municipal Orchestra. He had many enemies, musicians and music critics among them, but to be killed in mid flow suggests an act of the coldest calculation. Told through the letters of Detective Inspector Alan Hope to his wife, he puzzles over his findings, and other documents such as the letters of members of the orchestra and musical notation holding clues to the crime. This addition to the Crime Classics series is an immersive musical mystery, featuring diagrams of the orchestra arrangement and four pages of musical notation with relevance to the plot. First published in 1941 but out-of-print since, this is by a lost writer of the genre, Sebastian Farr (a pseudonym for Eric Walter Blom), a prolific Swiss-born and British-naturalised music lexicographer, music critic and writer.

If you ever needed proof that a magazine can have a love affair with a musician, you're holding it in your hands. For DownBeat, the preeminent publication of the jazz world, Miles Dewey Davis was one of its most cherished subjects. Since it began covering the jazz scene in 1939, no other artist has been more diligently chronicled in its pages than Davis. The beauty of this collection is seeing the development of an artist over time. The reviews of his music go from quietly introducing a new talent to revering, perhaps, the greatest jazz artist of his generation. The feature articles begin with a very young, very polite Davis lamenting, “I've worked so little. I could probably tell you where I was playing any night in the last three years.” As he develops, the interviews show Davis gaining confidence and stature, showing swagger and becoming the over-the-top, say-it-like-it-is showman that made every interview an event. The Miles Davis Reader compiles more than 200 news stories, feature articles, and reviews by some of the greatest writers in jazz into one volume. It delivers a patchwork of his words and music – in the moment, as they happened. With several lengthy features added along with a dozen new photographs, this new edition is a beautiful series of snapshots, a year-by-year ride through the many phases of Davis as an artist and as a man.

This book is an interdisciplinary work that weaves literary interpretation, legal theory, and philosophical doctrine about sex and love into a coherent mosaic in the context of two of Shakespeare’s plays: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. In the process, the work advances literary interpretations of the plays including character studies of some of the main protagonists. The aim is partly theoretical but mostly practical: to demonstrate what we can learn about living a robustly meaningful and significant human life by taking Shakespeare’s work seriously from contemporary philosophical and legal vantage points. Shakespeare does not reveal a tightly defined moral system that he is trying to urge upon his audience. Instead, Shakespeare challenges his audience to struggle with moral complexity as they confront conflicting elements surrounding legal and moral issues presented in his work and within the souls of his characters. His issues and their conflicts are also ours. Much of Shakespeare’s work consists of raising weighty questions inextricably connected to the human condition and inviting his audience to ponder possible answers. The philosophical lessons about living our lives meaningfully and significantly that we can derive from Shakespeare are simple yet powerful.