reading | The Smart Set

Daisy Goodwill and the Montana Rockies

Darlene West — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

I remember a lake rimmed with lily pads; a meadow filled with sun. The uphill stretch of trail where I stepped round a bend and came eyeball to eyeball with a mountain goat. Now, the goat may have been a bighorn sheep. It wasn’t the curve of the horns, so much, or the softness of […]

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The Last Emperor

Balu George — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 11:30:00 +0000

The boy of 11 is at a book fair. School is out in Cochin, India, and he has dragged his father along to the book fair in the city. In two days’ time, the family is going on vacation to Ahmednagar, where his father’s elder brother stays. The uncle works in a sugar factory there, […]

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Beautiful and Damned

Colin Fleming — Mon, 15 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Having unfortunately passed through many dating sites as I navigate this life in search of a person I find hard to believe exists, I’m accustomed to the reoccurring bromides people share about their lives. They can, for instance, stay in or go out, which is quite a marvelous feat. They are all living their best […]

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An Ode to Perfume Strips

Rhoda Feng — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 10:40:00 +0000

Does reading leave a residue? Whenever I’ve accumulated a stash of glossy magazines, I like to make strips from the perfume samples embedded in their pages. These I will turn into bookmarks, which will turn me into a voracious consumer of words. That, at least, is the promise contained in voluptuous notes of sunny daffodil […]

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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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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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Books and Bias

Paula Marantz Cohen — Mon, 24 May 2021 13:59:11 +0000

I am a fan of Rex Stout’s detective novels. While so much during this pandemic has caused me stress and reinforced a sense of loneliness, these novels are familiar friends who induce calm and joy. I have had them on my shelves for decades, some probably inherited from my father, born in 1925, and wide-ranging and eclectic in his reading. In other words, Stout’s novels exist as a world that connects me to that of […]

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Orange Comfort

Labeja Kodua Okullu — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 12:01:32 +0000

I started riding a bike again last year. It’s something I went back to during lockdown. It empties me, releases all the thoughts within as I concentrate on the lactic acid in my thighs and the voice of whichever podcast I’m listening to; I sweat and stain my clothes, and taste its sharp salty tang […]

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New Orleans

Matt Hanson — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 11:30:00 +0000

When my gal got a job teaching in the big easy in the summer of 2019, the movers asked us where we were going they were excited for us. In some ways, Boston will always be special to me, but about a year and a half after I’ve made the switch I find that I […]

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Bierce’s Devilish Words

Colin Fleming — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 14:51:33 +0000

One of the very first writers who ever thrilled me with that epiphanic frisson of “well, this is something new, isn’t it?” was Ambrose Bierce. My college lit classes were akin to swimming in seas of sameness, with an emphasis on that which was safe; that is, work that had been taught for seeming eons. Ambrose […]

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