The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the date in the subject line.
As of this writing on Sunday evening, I’m still in the country where I’ve been helping out jen bekman at Scope Hamptons, and so Le Smart Set will be postponed until later…ish (It’s been really fascinating. Naturally there were the teeming hordes of the scary tanned and cheesy-rich for the most part and everything is so exey I wanna die, but I also got to discuss the fascination with nature that emerged following the Industrial Revolution as one possible explanation for the mythic animal imagery that’s so hot right now in contemporary art, e.g. “She-Wolf #9,” and I’ve been swimming in the evenings under a starry sky). Until then, check out this artist whose work I saw in another booth on Saturday– Harland Miller does these dead clever paintings of book covers. My favorite: Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore. Of course.
UPDATED, my picks for the rest of the summer:
FRIDAY, 8.3: Jeffrey Frank, the novelist and senior editor of the New Yorker who the Wall Street Journal calls ‘delicately lethal,’ reads from Trudy Hopedale, along with Helen Schulman, author of A Day at the Beach, as part of the Paragraph reading series, which is free and sexy and also involves wine and cheese afterwards with the writers. Yum [Full disclosure, as always: Jeff is one of my PR clients]. 8PM, FREE.
FRIDAY, 8.17: Maud + Rupert = better together. Free convo at McNally Robinson @ 7PM. Be there or cry, cry, cry.
If you are in Los Angeles tonight, lucky things, go and hear the always elegant Mark Sarvas read from his hotly anticipated forthcoming novel. In Paris, there’s the Bicycle Film Festival. In Philadelphia, last chance to catch the Karen Kilimnik exhibition: “Drawing correspondences between romantic tradition and consumer culture, Kilimnik’s work brings a haunting and contrary sense of beauty to contemporary art…a quest for the romantic sublime.”
And with that, I’m going back to reading my favorite poem this week: “I love systems.” I love the Smart Set, too, and you, but we all need a break. Back after Labor Day then.