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 . . .
My review of Ellen Litman’s The Last Chicken in America appears in the weekend’s New York Times Book Review. Here’s an excerpt: That people won’t read story collections is an axiom at publishing houses and a common notion in newspaper idea pieces. Whether it was ever true I tend to doubt, but it certainly isn’t now. Evidence springs effortlessly to . . .
Norman Mailer’s probably too ill to appreciate the first issue of The Mailer Review, which includes interviews, letters to & from DeLillo, photos, and more.
Miami’s Books & Books, the epicenter of literary South Florida, celebrates 25 years, & local writers honor founder Michell Kaplan.
Longtime readers know that I’m endlessly entertained by the bilaterally condescending friendship that sprang up between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov in the mid-1900s. Reading Wilson’s Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s, I was amused to discover a review — dated September 9, 1944 — excoriating Nabokov’s puns. (The book under consideration is Nabokov’s study of Nikolai . . .