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The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events

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 . . .

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Hustle & merlot: The new New York City

My review of Richard Price’s Lush Life appears in the Boston Globe’s books section this weekend. Here’s an excerpt: Luxury lofts have replaced flophouses. Haute cuisine has supplanted the soup kitchens. Post-Giuliani, Manhattan’s once-edgy Lower East Side seems like a Wi-Fi wonderland, a kind of theme park where, as writer Richard Price has observed, young would-be artists flit between coffee . . .

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A voice that wasn’t hers

Poetry was Grace Paley’s first and last literary love, but she doubted the worth of her own. “I never got it, really,” she said. (Via.)

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