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By STEVE PFARRER

Not so long ago, there was a general lament sometimes heard among Valley musicians: “There aren’t enough places to play around here.”That might have been true for professional players who wanted to be paid — and maybe, despite the opening of new local...

By STEVE PFARRER

When Chris Smither found his live gigs shut down during the worst months of COVID-19, he figured it might at least be a good opportunity to write some new songs — something the veteran folk/blues singer and guitarist admits is not the easiest process...

By STEVE PFARRER

Amherst College has sent many a successful writer into the world, or brought them in to teach: David Foster Wallace, Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, Robert Stone, Lauren Groff, Chris Bohjalian, Charles Mann and many others.That legacy will be celebrated...

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

A bit over 10 years ago, Ilan Stavans, the longtime Amherst College professor and writer, made his first venture into the business world: starting a publishing company dedicated to international writing.Restless Books, whose tagline is “an...

By STEVE PFARRER

Valley writers have had a strong run of major awards in recent years, from poet Martín Espada winning a National Book Award in 2021 to novelist Ruth Ozeki claiming Great Britain’s Women’s Prize for Literature last year.Now. over a dozen area writers...

By STEVE PFARRER

He’s been hailed as one of the best songwriters around, a troubadour of small-town America and the hardscrabble lives of its citizens.But James McMurtry has always taken a low-key approach to his music, and he did it again last week when he played a...

By STEVE PFARRER

It’s mostly a lesser-known footnote to his career: From 1983 to 1986, James Baldwin was based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was part of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies and taught students from across the...

By STEVE PFARRER

February has its national landmarks: Presidents Day, the Super Bowl, Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day.In the Valley, February also means it’s time for Amherst College’s LitFest.Now in its eighth year, the college’s literary festival brings acclaimed and...

By STEVE PFARRER

The idea first came to Elijah Bynum about four years ago when he was exercising in a California gym and noticed an ultra-serious bodybuilder, a guy who was “radiating intensity” as he went through his paces.“There was this really intense energy about...

By STEVE PFARRER

As Marianne Xenos sees it, you’re never too old to find new ways to be creative.Xenos, of Amherst, is a longtime visual artist who also received a degree in literature years ago and wrote poetry and short literary fiction for a time. But that writing...

By STEVE PFARRER

Like so many people, Catherine Newman’s life has been touched by cancer. In 2015, Newman, an Amherst writer, lost a close friend, Ali, whom she’d known since childhood, to ovarian cancer.As painful as that was, Newman also recalls Ali’s passing as a...