David Stromberg | The Smart Set

The Smart Set — Then and Now

David Stromberg — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Despite its outsize influence on American literature, The Smart Set is hardly known today. Yet there was a time when the writing in its pages set the tone for the social and cultural debates of the period. Originally founded in 1900 by Colonel William d’Alton Mann as a magazine for New York’s upper classes, in […]

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When Antisemitism Happens to Good People

David Stromberg — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 12:39:30 +0000

One of the most powerful films I’ve seen about anti-Jewish hate during the Second World War isn’t a period piece depicting the ferocious brutality of Nazi death camps or an action flick about partisans fighting German soldiers in forests covered with snow. It’s a picturesque French film called The Two of Us about a Jewish boy who […]

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We Tell Stories in Order to Die

David Stromberg — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 11:30:00 +0000

I turned 39 not long after my first daughter was born. When she was about five months old, I saw the big four-oh on the horizon, and started to think about what I was going to leave behind when I was gone, at least from a literary perspective. So I looked at the bookshelf of […]

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Lacan’s Mistake

David Stromberg — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 13:27:18 +0000

The truth is that I never thought I’d get through an entire book by Jacques Lacan. But then the pandemic broke out, and I found myself at home with time to read The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. I’ll admit that what drew me into the book was the drama of its provenance. Lacan had […]

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