The Summer She Was Under Water by Jen Michalski
Stephanie Bento reviews The Summer She Was Under Water by Jen Michalski today in Rumpus Books.
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Posts by: Stephanie Bento
Native Poetry
Over at the North American Review, Heid E. Erdrich writes about the forthcoming New Poets of Native Nations. The collection, which will be published by Graywolf Press in 2018, will feature works from “21 poets whose first books were published in the 21st century and who are members/citizen or descendants with status of indigenous/Native American/Alaskan […]
...moreReimagining The Tempest
How to create a credible contemporary novel from a work written four centuries ago for the stage? In a New York Times Book Review, author Emily St. John Mandel reviews Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, a modern interpretation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
...moreA Writerly Conversation with Amelia Gray
In reading short story collections I always gravitated towards the shortest story, curious to find the idea expressed in the shortest amount of time. Over at the jmww blog, Jen Michalski talks to Amelia Gray about short fiction, flash fiction, and fables.
...morePortrait of an Actress
In an article for the New Yorker, Richard Brody writes about the newly restored 1967 film by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Romy: Anatomy of a Face. The film “offers an intimate view of the actress Romy Schneider, revealing crucial conflicts behind the image of a public figure who loomed large in the German national imagination—and within the […]
...moreJulia Deck on the Game of Writing
To me, writing a book is also creating a game for both myself and the reader. Over at the Believer Logger, Natasha Boas talks to Julia Deck, author of Viviane Élisabeth Fauville, about unreliable narrators, conciseness, titles, Paris, French publishing houses, and mysteries.
...moreThese Small Little Containers
I think that poets and songwriters have a lot in common because a songwriter really has to be a poet first. That’s how we live our lives. It’s the same kind of thinking. … [W]e put our stories into these small little containers filled with mostly short lines and verses. This is how we talk […]
...moreA Cri de Coeur
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, J.T. Price reflects on the 40th anniversary of the film, Network, and the responsibility of the news media. “Who are we, after all, to judge the substance of what media conglomerates present to us?” Price asks. “Only the rightful owners of the airwaves,” he writes.
...moreZadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides in Conversation
I only have a curiosity, an interest, a love, and that’s it, really. At the New Yorker, Michele Moses shares a video clip from the 2016 New Yorker Festival featuring writers Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides in conversation about their writing habits, point of view, and research. Separately, in a New York Times article, Eugenides […]
...moreHonoring Wonder Woman
The United Nations is poised to name comic hero Wonder Woman an honorary ambassador for the empowerment of women and girls at an October 21 event, Alison Flood reports for the Guardian. The occasion, which coincides with the character’s 75th anniversary, “will also mark the launch of the UN’s landmark global campaign supporting Sustainable Development Goal […]
...moreShakespeare in Boston
Boston Public Library aims to cut through 400 years of literary analysis and explore the pages of Shakespeare’s original writings, including some of his most famous works. The Boston Public Library has a new exhibition, “Shakespeare Unauthorized,” which features four Shakespearean folios and other artifacts, Talia Avakian reports for Travel + Leisure. Visit the library’s website to […]
...moreDreaming of Oscar
Katherine you must come to my table. I’ve got Oscar Wilde there. He’s the most marvelous man I ever met. He’s splendid! Over at the Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring posted an excerpt from Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 letter to her husband describing a dream in which she met the playwright Oscar Wilde.
...moreReading in New York
At the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz writes about the New York Public Library’s newly renovated Rose Main Reading Room, which was closed for two and half years for restorations. “The room is one of the city’s great public spaces, a shared chamber devoted to private mental endeavors, and it’s looking good,” Schwartz says.
...moreUrban Poetry
In a modern world where hyper-connectivity often results in disconnection from our immediate surroundings, creating the space to explore poetry can make us more reflective and engaged citizens. Over at the Guardian, Rosie Spinks writes about how poetry can both express urban life, and make it more beautiful.
...moreWords & Music
If you were to hear a story with its own soundtrack, it’s going to affect how you feel and interact with that story, even if you’re not directly paying attention to the music, and vice versa. I also believe that language is the shortened version of music. They’re just different methods of communication. Over at […]
...moreFinding Your Voice
Authenticity of voice can only come from authentic work. And authentic work doesn’t come from the head; it’s an outgrowth of authentic feeling. In a post for the Ploughshares blog, Annie Weatherwax considers how writing an artistic statement can help artists and writers find their voice. She writes: “As an artist, the artistic statement requires […]
...moreThe Art of Twitter
Over at the New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer writes about novelist Rabih Alameddine’s artful Twitter feed and how posting paintings and photographs is part of the author’s writing process. “[W]hile the welter of distractions on the Internet is a liability to many authors, Twitter settles him,” Blitzer writes.
...moreExperiencing FoST Fest
“We are creating a unique story world,” said Charles Melcher, the festival’s founder. “Our tag line is ‘All the world’s a stage, come be a player,’ and this is the ultimate expression of that sentiment.” In an article for the New York Times, Julie Satow writes about the first-ever Future of StoryTelling Festival (aka FoST […]
...moreParis and All That Jazz
While Fitzgerald’s haunts have certainly evolved over the years, and some have disappeared altogether, visitors to Paris can still relive the old-fashioned glamor of Fitzgerald’s Paris. It requires imagination, champagne, and a touch of despair. In an article for Travel + Leisure, Jess McHugh writes about the Paris of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and how visitors […]
...moreLove Thyself
For NPR, Annalisa Quinn reviews Eimear McBride’s new novel, The Lesser Bohemians. “For McBride’s characters … love encroaches into and alters the inner self,” Quinn writes. “The Lesser Bohemians is a love story, yes, but it is really an electric and beautiful account of how the walls of self shift and buckle and are rebuilt.”
...moreA Weird and Wonderful World
In a New York Times book review of Alexandra Kleeman’s short story collection, Intimations, Hermione Hoby writes: Like an alien intent on some meticulous anthropological mission on Earth, Alexandra Kleeman seems always to be encountering the world for the first time. Hoby goes on to explore how Kleeman writes about “the oddness of bodies,” and […]
...moreNavigating French
Over at The Millions, Hannah Gersen interviews Lauren Collins about her memoir, When in French; learning a foreign language; and writing about herself. As Collins recalls: I wanted to describe the terrain of French, the kind of landscape and its physical features and its hills and valleys. I was thinking of it that way. To […]
...moreImagining Orsinia
I begin to find my way about, to feel myself at home, here in Orsenya, matrya miya, my motherland. I can live here, and find out who else lives here and what they do, and tell stories about it. And so I did. Over at the Paris Review, read an excerpt from the author’s introduction to Ursula […]
...moreWriter, Storyteller, Pilot, Spy
Though he fled the country as soon as possible, the writer would maintain an affection for Canada that lasted throughout his life. Over at The Walrus, Michael Hingston explores Roald Dahl’s time at Camp X—a World War II army base in Canada for the British Security Coordination, a covert intelligence organization. Dahl was sent there […]
...moreWriterly Conversation
In a Salon interview, authors Teddy Wayne and Alexandra Kleeman talk to each other about their recent books, character- and world-building, and alienation and anxiety in their novels. “Every story I write begins with a different distribution of knowns and unknowns, which I try to assess before I begin writing,” Kleeman says. “I’ve never gone […]
...moreWhat Makes a Story a Story
Over at the Atlantic, Joe Fassler talks to Alice Mattison about how Grace Paley’s short stories encouraged her to write fiction. Mattison recalls: From Paley, I learned that I could write about lives and feelings like those I knew.
...moreLessons from The Little Virtues
For the New Yorker, author Belle Boggs reflects on Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg’s collection of essays, The Little Virtues, and how the book influenced her own parenting philosophy. Boggs writes: The title essay considers what we should teach children—“not the little virtues but the great ones,” according to Ginzburg.
...moreOmniscience Is In
In a New York Times article, Elliott Holt writes about how omniscience is making a comeback in contemporary fiction. She writes: The effects of omniscience are authority and scope; novels with such narrators seem especially confident. The characters may be uncertain, but we sense the controlling force above them. Omniscience reinforces that we are reading […]
...moreThe Lyrics of Friendship
What is friendship if not learning the song of another’s heart and singing it back to them? In a reflection on friendship and language, Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova explores Eudora Welty’s writings on the topic. Popova writes: “[I]t might be the basic necessities of friendship, [Welty] suggests, that sparked in us the evolutionary need for […]
...moreAesthetics and Poetics
Over at The Walrus, Michael Prior talks with poet Hoa Nguyen about the assessment of poetry, poetic communities in the US and Canada, and the role of silence and space in her own poetry: I see spacing as a way to introduce visual interest. It cues the reader to apprehend units of sense and ‘score’ […]
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