The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled and posted by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30 pm, 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 Ms. Cerand at lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to . . .
The Library of Congress is celebrating the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth with a special exhibition of his most famous writings and relics (that aren’t lost to time). For those of us not in D.C., the library digitized some of its Abraham Lincoln Papers a few years ago, and you can browse them online. All three series … are of a . . .
When Muriel Spark died a few years ago, writer Katharine Weber implored me to go beyond the works I’d already read and admired — The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Finishing School — to Spark’s “utterly sublime first novel, The Comforters, written to save herself from madness. You can learn how to write your own first novel from . . .
Evidently Alain Robbe-Grillet once complained bitterly about Last Year at Marienbad, saying the director ruined his script.
For Lincoln’s 200th birthday, the National Park Service opens a museum at the house where he wrote the Gettysburg Address.