The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays 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 submit details to lauren@maudnewton.com. MONDAY, 3.21: Because sometimes, when choosing events, I have to ask myself, “What Would Henry Miller . . .
Reviewing Parini’s new biography of William Faulkner, J.M. Coetzee considers the addiction that fueled the southern novelist’s fiction: The acid test is what Faulkner’s biographers have to say about his alcoholism. Here one should not pussyfoot about terminology. The notation on the file at the psychiatric hospital in Memphis to which Faulkner was regularly taken in a stupor was: “An . . .
Zoe Heller offers a reasoned, insightful review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Chris Lehmann argues that a new biography of William Maxwell rests partly on a “jargon-laden claim” that is “simultaneously grandiose and banal — and more to the point, oddly irrelevant to Maxwell’s writing.” Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Jane Austen continues . . .
This weekend Mr. Maud* and I watched the inaugural episode (leaked by the BBC?) of the new Doctor Who series. It was pretty damned good (although I had some concerns about the one-dimensionality of the boyfriend character). After we watched it, I thought: well, that’s the only contact with culture (in the loosest sense) I’ve had all week, and I’ll . . .
My review of A.L. Kennedy’s masterful Paradise, turned in early last week, appears in Newsday today. Unfortunately, I omitted an important qualification from one sentence. The phrase that reads “a relative stranger, it turns out, and not one with whom she’s having an affair,” should read “a relative stranger, it turns out, and not one with whom she’s having an . . .