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 . . .
Aha. I’m not the only one utterly repulsed by Hogan’s “publishing hotties” series, which tops any vapid book-world gaucherie Muriel Spark could’ve foreseen. (See also.)
The L.A. Times’ Josh Getlin puts the lie to the ridiculous notion that book bloggers are responsible for the demise of print book reviews.
Betty Hester, longtime correspondent, friend, and “adopted kin” to Flannery O’Connor, donated the letters she received from the Southern writer to Emory University in 1987, with the stipulation that they remain sealed for twenty years. In 1998 she committed suicide with a hollow-nose bullet aimed at her skull, after spending the afternoon eating a day-late Christmas dinner and playfully mocking . . .
Martha Rebecca Johnston, my grandmother, was born April 23, 1905. She died nine years ago, on May 6, 1998. This post originally included an anecdote about her dream of heaven, which she wasn’t too crazy about, and her funeral, and now you can read it at the end of “My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a . . .