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 . . .
Edmund White’s NYRB essay on Marguerite Duras reveals that she worked as a censor under Nazi occupation, a period that saw the withdrawal of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and of titles by Freud, Zola, and Colette, while Quantities of paper … were allotted to the publication of Goebbels’s memoirs, Paul Claudel’s Ode to Marshall Pétain, and the vilest anti-Semitic . . .
Z sends word that the next meeting of Urban Librarians Unite is tomorrow, 6/17, at The Creek and the Cave. 7 p.m.
I delayed renewing my NYer subscription & missed Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry. A friend calls it “one of the most achingly beautiful stories I’ve ever read.”
Kafka practiced worker’s comp law. Princeton UP says his writings on the subject reveal him to be a sharp litigator and canny bureaucrat.