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 event’s date in the subject line.
The “Miss Mistletoe” Edition
MONDAY, 12.11: Having just ditched my longtime, probably trademark glasses for contacts, I can absolutely appreciate the following: “Girl With Glasses is author Marissa Walsh’s memoir … of her bespectacled past, from Walsh’s search for the perfect frames to the cultural, political, and sartorial implications of glasses-wearing.” Fascinating! Have fun, nerds. Highly recommended. At the Half King. 7:00pm, FREE.
TUESDAY, 12.12: “Green Apple Talk #2: The Urban Environment explores the connection between urban planning, architecture, and contemporary design. How can we make our buildings, transportation and cities better for both the environment and people? What decisions can people make in the urban environment that can have a positive impact, both now and into the future? Featuring Buzz Poole, editor of Green Design, Alex Marshall, author of Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities, and urban planner and blogger Shin-Pei Tsay. Moderated by best-selling author Bryan Keefer. ” 7:00pm, FREE [full disclosure, as always: I put this event together].
WEDNESDAY, 12.13: It’s so much more fun to say it if you shriek it — WAS SHE PRETTY?! author Leanne Shapton reads from her work at Amanda Stern’s excellent Happy Ending Reading Series. 8:00pm, FREE. Uptown, “Internationally best-selling author Hitomi Kanehara will discuss her novel Snakes and Earrings. Hitomi Kanehara was born in Tokyo on August 8, 1983. She stopped attending school at the age of eleven. After she left home as a teenager, she sent her stories to her literary translator father by e-mail and he helped her edit them. At the age of 21, she wrote Snakes and Earrings which won the 2004 Akutagawa Prize, a prestigious Japanese literary award. The Japanese edition of Snakes and Earrings has sold over a million copies, topping all the bestseller lists.” At Columbia University, 403 Kent Hall. Highly recommended. 6:00pm, FREE. And, Hey Hot Shot! is more than just the evening’s best pick-up line as a new round of fresh faces exhibit their winning photos at jen bekman [where, full disclosure, as always: I am the PR director]. 6:00 – 8:00pm, FREE.
THURSDAY, 12.14: Behind the Book presents an evening with powerhouse novelists Jennifer Egan, Sigrid Nunez and Katharine Weber, at KGB [Full disclosure, as always: Katharine is one of my PR clients].
FRIDAY, 12.15: Friday’s reason to heart New York: a screening of films by Joseph Cornell at Anthology Film Archives. 7:30pm, $8.
SATURDAY, 12.16: Spending a Saturday afternoon at the DIA Beacon would be pretty much perfect. In the city, the prospect of Anthology Film Archives delights once again, with a screening of Zvenigora: “[Alexandr] Dovzhenko’s second film, attacked by Soviet critics for being so beautifully rendered as to actually lessen its political impact, remains today a ‘cinematic poem’ as the director named it. Dovzhenko wrote: ‘I did not so much make the picture as sing it out like a songbird.’ Episodic, folkloric, and allegorical, it is a mythic search for hidden treasure by two brothers.” 5:00pm, $8.
SUNDAY, 12.17: KGB’s Sunday night fiction series presents an evening with Maxine Swann and Robert Marshall [Full disclosure, as always: I’ve been pleased to work with Robert to promote his debut, A Separate Reality]. 7:00pm, FREE.
UPCOMING: The MetaxuCafé.com Holiday Mixer. Cha-cha-cha-cha-cha.