writing | The Smart Set

First Story

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 11:30:00 +0000

On my first birthday after the death of my father, all I wanted was to spend the afternoon with him at the cemetery. He had never missed a birthday of mine; not even when he was in a wheelchair in a recovery facility, and I was a little girl on the other side of the […]

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The Creator Almost Broke Me

Thu, 09 May 2024 18:46:21 +0000

Typically, the career path to film criticism doesn’t start with a 7-year-old in class declaring that they want to review movies when they grow up. As a kid from Nairobi, my journey toward a life dedicated to analyzing film began when my elder brothers exposed me early to movies that required me to access more […]

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Let By-lines be Bylines

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 12:09:37 +0000

Something unprecedented in the history of the English language occurs in Chapter II of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises. Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, interrupts a conversation with Robert Cohn in order to attend to an assignment. While Cohn sits in their outer office, Jake and his colleagues spend two hours […]

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Cutting Up

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

“A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this […]

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Brilliant Zingers and Vodka Stingers

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

During the second episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans — producer Ryan Murphy’s streaming series based on author Truman Capote’s lived-in-and-laughed-over 1960s among Manhattan’s “ladies who lunch” — titular actor Tom Hollander truly has his way with spite. Leaning with persnickety dread into a line that all but explains the raison d’etre of biting […]

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Why Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West is the perfect novel for a world in turmoil

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Since its much-celebrated publication in 2017, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, an uncompromisingly modern story of love, migration, and transformation, has continued to gain relevance. Amidst continuing geopolitical, technological, and cultural turmoil, readers of Hamid’s tale gain insight into the complexity of the contemporary world while finding unexpected comfort in the novel’s central truth: that “we […]

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Shehan Karunatilaka Will Kick You Out at Midnight

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Ventriloquism “I only became famous in October,” mumbled Shehan Karunatilaka as he leaned on the wall of the Chandni Chowk metro station and lit a cigarette. Here, in downtown Kolkata, with its crumbling office blocks and chaotic sidewalks, the long-haired, eyebrow-pierced writer from Sri Lanka was about as conspicuous as a dirty napkin in a […]

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When the Satanists Moved In

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Writer Paul Crenshaw found himself trying to make sense of the fear that engulfed everything in his 1980s childhood in small-town Arkansas and the world around him. The Cold War. Stranger Danger. Satanic Panic. In his most recent book of essays Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other ’80s Perils, published by The Ohio […]

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What is Not Imaginable

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:36:07 +0000

I’m trying to find the interview where Robert Hass, in speaking of his children, says something along the lines of having enjoyed having them around while he wrote. At first, I found the comment somewhere between comforting and inspiring, having a young child myself in the house as I try to write. Then, I could […]

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Walking Autistic with Skoliogeography

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I am going to the corniche because I am always going to the corniche, but then diversion: in the butcher’s window, the gloss of a goat’s gelatinous eye and the reflection of electricity fizzing from streetlights that should have gone dead at dawn. From the shop next door mannequins jamble the doorway, their faces piously […]

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