Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
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On Choosing Translation
Nothing connects you with a text or an author like being a translator. Book Riot contributor Rachel Cordasco reached out to twelve literary translators and asked them what inspired them to pursue a career in translation. Their answers will inspire you,…
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Writing as a Cure
Word by word, and brick by brick, I began understanding the foundation of myself—of where I had been, and where I would go—from previously unseen angles. Over at Brevity’s nonfiction blog, Lauretta Zucchetti shares her experience of finding herself and…
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A Few Favorites
Over at the New York Times Sunday Book Review, playwright and author Sarah Ruhl shares which works of literature have had an impact on her life, things that are written in water, and the wonderful feeling of not knowing what…
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Pen, Paper, and Prose
You can run on and on because writing by hand does that, makes your sentences long and serpentine, like a river whose ending you don’t see until you turn the last bend. Over at Read Her Like an Open Book,…
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Writing New York City
Author Kristopher Jansma talks to Electric Literature about his new novel, Why We Came to the City, and writing about the greatest city on Earth: I realized what I can do is write about the New York I know. I…
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What’s in a Name?
The latest issue of The Gentlewoman features Deborah Orr’s email interview with Elena Ferrante, who shares her thoughts on anonymity, the protagonists in her Neapolitan novels, and feminism. Ferrante says: Using the name Elena helped only to reinforce the truth…
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The Prose and Poetry of Idra Novey
I find the more furtively I move between genres, the more I surprise myself as a writer. Moving between genres, you carry curious things over and also carry them away. I like the gray areas between genres—prose that reads like…
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Tender Recollections
What, indeed, but ungovernable love? Such youthful sensations as the longing to be known wholly and exclusively by another McKeon remembers and tenderly records. Over at the New York Times, Christine Schutt reviews Belinda McKeon’s latest novel, Tender, a story…
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A Note about Love
Elegance is a refinement of simplicity rather than a flourish of excess. Elegance prompts wit rather than comedy, sentiment rather than sentimentality. Such restraint is the lens through which all the diffuse sensations of desire are focused into the flame…
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The Language of Poetry
But the truth is, it might not be travel so much as languages that inform and inspire me. It’s the defamiliarization that foreign languages provide that makes me want to work harder to appreciate and fully inhabit my own. Over…
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Helle Helle’s Brilliant Brilliant Novel
So I re-read the opening, then the end once more. I looked at the cover. I turned it over to contemplate what’s already been said about it. I set the book down on the bench next to me and smiled.…
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Three Little Words.
Exciting news for poets everywhere! Northumberland’s Northern Poetry Library is piloting a new poetic form called the anchored terset. The Guardian reports: “The anchored terset strips poetry down to the bones, consisting of four lines, three words and just one…