literature | The Smart Set

Town and Country

Richard Klin — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Some time ago, I embarked on a personal reading project: An informal survey of books that once had been widely read — so widely read, in fact, that they had earned their place in the literary lexicon. The criteria for my project did have certain strictures. The operative word was once. The contents of these […]

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A Travesty of Justice

Daniel A. Hill — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Given the headlines, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the injudicious behavior of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. I know the man unusually well. In 2012, the editors of The Wall Street Journal’s law blog asked me to weigh in on the question of whether the Supremes would uphold or invalidate Obamacare. […]

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In Search of Proust’s Genius

Paula Marantz Cohen — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Can a work of art be deeply flawed and still be great? One of the reasons that some once-revered works in the Western canon have been treated so shabbily in recent years is that, once a new lens is introduced that illuminates their flaws, critics have been exceptionally severe. But great things need a certain […]

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slaying the cruelty of life

James Ladd Thomas — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 12:30:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I contacted an old friend, Patricia, to inform her that my new novel, Lester Lies Down, was about to be published. I’ve known Patricia since the summer of 2005 when we attended the Southampton Writers’ Conference and were in the same fiction workshop led by Melissa Bank. A few days later […]

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Another day at the (Cl)Office

Stan Tymorek — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 12:36:12 +0000

Have you heard of the new blend word “cloffice”? It’s a room that you create by turning a large closet into an office, usually in a house that doesn’t have such a room for solitary work. If your work is writing, I suggest that you keep some of the clothes hanging in there when you […]

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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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Point of Entry

Leslie Lindsay — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 11:25:00 +0000

I am standing on a concrete-and-glass balcony, watching my peers, on a yoga platform in a writing circle, when the thought comes to me. I am so done with writing. I close my eyes and can see the words spelled out, letter by letter, on the dark backs of my lids. There’s an ache in […]

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Walking Words, Words Walking

Colin Fleming — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 11:30:00 +0000

Everyone recognizes that guy who specializes in fake cerebral-ness. He’s all about the pose. You’ll encounter him at the café on a Sunday afternoon when you’re powering through your hot chocolate, and there he’ll be, sliding his copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita ever-closer to the woman seated at his side, as if […]

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A New Scar in Time

Greg Gerke — Thu, 26 May 2022 13:48:06 +0000

One of my dreams was the synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in my waking hours, of a certain seagirt place and its mediaeval past. In my sleep I saw a gothic fortress rising from a sea whose waves were stilled as in a painted window. An arm of the sea […]

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Megan Walsh’s The Subplot

Jeremy Ray Jewell — Mon, 16 May 2022 11:30:00 +0000

There has never been a better time to begin acquainting yourself with contemporary Chinese literature, and Megan Walsh’s The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters is an invaluable guide to that journey. It is a slim volume, but it is broad in its scope. It is focused on Chinese works published and read within the last […]

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