Dear readers, Last night, hundreds piled into the downtown French brasserie Balthazar to toast a new book, “I Regret Almost Everything.” The grand location — with its soaring mirrors, deep marble bar, oxblood banquettes and flattering golden lighting — evoked the spare-no-expense parties of publishing’s ritzier days. It helped that the restaurant was started by the author of the night, Keith McNally, who is not exactly known for restraint. McNally — the brash, impertinent, P.C.-weary restaurateur who has had a tremendous influence on New York’s dining culture — suffered a stroke several years ago that deprived him of fluent speech and the use of an arm. I’d never heard him talk before, though I had developed an idea of his point of view based on the meticulous décor and style of cooking in his restaurants. So it was no surprise to learn from the book that McNally has strong feelings about presentation and communication — namely, language. He’s nursed a longstanding antipathy for cant and cliché (“I doubt that I could love anyone who uses the phrase ‘reach out to,’ or the equally odious ‘learning curve,’” he notes), and admits he pays close attention to a person’s particular idiom. These strong preferences take on a bittersweet feel coming from a man who regrets that his voice still sounds as garbled as if he were speaking underwater. “Though I’ve always valued language, these days with my voice being close to incomprehensible I appreciate it even more,” McNally writes. “Words I once merely enjoyed now give me inconceivable pleasure. Conversely, words and phrases I used to dislike I now detest beyond reason.” The man whose restaurants serve some of the city’s best fries and send out the most astronomical seafood towers derives “inconceivable pleasure” from the English language. That’s a good reminder for anyone who ever doubts if writing actually matters, which I do more often than I’d care to admit. I was reminded of that fact all last week, too, during our first-ever Poetry Challenge. As a subscriber to this newsletter you’ve no doubt heard me and my colleagues bang on about this at length, so I’ll just thank all of you who followed along. It was wonderful to hear from so many of you about your experiences with it. I’ll recap the literary news you might have missed while murmuring “Recuerdo” under your breath. See you on Friday. In other news
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