The first two chapters of Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale are so bitchily insightful about the hypocrisies of literary culture that, if you’re a writer, your loved ones might want to hide out somewhere else while you’re reading it, lest you follow them around the house, cackling over and orating your favorite parts. Scandal erupted in bookish London when the . . .
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the date in the . . .
A bookstore owner whose books were rejected by libraries and thrift stores is burning his overstock to protest “diminishing support for the printed word.”
ZZ Packer, Laura Miller, and I will be on Talk of the Nation this afternoon for a segment devoted to summer reading. I don’t naturally think of books in terms of seasons, but in the past few years I’ve realized that my most manic reading experiences tend to happen in warm weather. See, e.g., Books that make you stand at . . .
Until all this family memorabilia came my way, I didn’t know that many picture postcards sent in the early 1900s were photos of people’s relatives. Last week’s shot of a scowling Martha Caroline and her barefoot granddaughters is an example, though it wasn’t actually mailed. Here’s a cheerier one, of Alma Kinchen, my great-grandmother, holding three puppies. She didn’t . . .