marriage | The Smart Set

Days of Long Ago

Elliot Wilner — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Dozens of young adults, most of them Scandinavian tourists, were happily chattering in the lobby of Eilat’s Hotel Snapir soon after sunset, after having spent another toasty day on the beach. The lobby was uncomfortably warm, maybe due to the heat that radiated from the tourists’ sunburned skins. Passing through the lobby, I opened the […]

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Arranging Love

Usha Raj — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Years after my mother had died, on a visit to my father in his childhood home in Nagercoil, India, where he had settled after his retirement, he told me he had always wanted to marry a Tamil girl from a prominent Christian family. Someone who had been selected by his beloved mother, someone who would […]

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Where I Knew You’d Be

David Joseph — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 12:30:00 +0000

I make it a point to try and visit the graves of writers once I get to the age they were when they died. But I made an exception for you, Raymond Carver. After all, I was still months shy of my 50th birthday when I went to see you. We were in Port Angeles, […]

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About Face

Gabrielle Nigmond — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 12:27:00 +0000

“How do I look?” I asked, unsure about leaving the house in just mascara. “You always look great. You’ve got a naturally beautiful face,” John responded. I chuckled at my boyfriend’s innocence and then spent the next month doing what I do best; obsessing over the idea that John thought this was my face. In […]

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Take Only One Memory

Joylyn Chai — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 12:30:00 +0000

If I could take only one memory into eternity, it would be the evening I fell in love with my husband. Long ago, I saw the film After Life by Japanese director, Hirokazu Koreeda. After watching two hours of an imagined purgatory set in what looked like an abandoned, unheated high school, I left the […]

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Mow the Tiles

Colin Fleming — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 14:30:00 +0000

I grew up in Mansfield, Massachusetts, which is perhaps not an especially notable place on its own, but I loved it. My neighborhood was loaded with kids, and we were all the same age. You played epic games of baseball and football in backyards, street hockey upon roads which hardly saw any traffic. There was a […]

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That Went for a Walk

David Bartholomae — Mon, 13 May 2019 11:30:50 +0000

“A line is a dot that went for a walk.” Paul Klee, the Swiss artist, is credited with saying this. I’ve not been able to track down where or when, but the phrase has traveled widely and is used in any number of exercise books for artists, catering to both children and adults. It calls […]

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Post-Revolution

Josh Shoemake — Thu, 09 May 2019 11:30:45 +0000

One afternoon in Marrakesh, a French pilot in dusty boots came into my wife’s restaurant for one of her famous hamburgers. He’d been out scouting parcels of land vast and flat enough for his dream which was to build a flight school for women and name it after Touria Chaoui. We’d never heard the name, […]

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The Dark Lady Ryan

Lynn Levin — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 12:20:43 +0000

In Dark Ladies & Other Avatars, her debut poetry collection, Joan Roberta Ryan pays exquisite attention to seeing, eating, feeling, reflecting, and remembering — acts of attention that define what it means to live fully and well. Lit up by sparkling specificity and wit, these beautifully crafted, mostly free verse poems focus on both lovely […]

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Shifting Expectations in Sayulita

Michele Bigley — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 15:33:46 +0000

A pro-surfer friend described Sayulita as a kid-friendly artist hamlet where you can surf in warm water year round, gorge on heaping plates of Mexico’s best fish tacos for two bucks, and have your morning latte. I was on the prowl for an unsanitized destination to get my son, Kai, his first passport stamp (which […]

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