Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
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District of Books
The American city that spends the most money on books, magazines, and newspapers—Washington, DC—will soon be left without any chain bookstores. Melville House reports that as of Dec. 31, 2015, there will no longer be any chain bookstores in the nation’s capital.…
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Language and Exile
Over at the New Yorker, writer Jhumpa Lahiri has written a hauntingly beautiful personal essay about learning Italian, leaving English, and finding her voice in linguistic exile: How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine?…
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Having It All
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s latest book, Unfinished Business, “suggests that equality cannot be achieved unless men and women are equally responsible for raising a family and bringing home income,” the Globe and Mail reported. Her solution? The modern workplace needs to change:…
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Mystery in Silicon Valley
Was this a brilliant viral marketing scheme, a literary treasure hunt orchestrated by some corporation angling for free publicity to promote a new energy drink or video game? Or was it a purely artistic endeavor, aimed at stimulating a discussion…
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Queen of Hearts
“Hello” is not really a compassionate breakup song, like Carole King and Toni Stern’s “It’s Too Late”—the breakup here seems to have happened long ago—but rather an acknowledgment that you can never really make a clean break, that the memories…
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Literary Iceland
Like the glaciers that cover much of the country, Iceland is covered with thick layers of stories. And like the volcanoes that roil beneath that icy crust, more stories are forming, ready to create a new geography. The New York…
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Open Books, Open Worlds
I wouldn’t be a songwriter if it wasn’t for the books I read as a kid. … When you can escape into a book it trains your imagination to think big and to think that more can exist than what…
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Language, Love, and Loss
Over at The Toast, Nicole Chung has written a deeply personal and beautiful essay about coming to terms with her adoption, embracing her Korean heritage, and learning her mother tongue alongside her daughter: When I watch my daughter writing in…
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Moulin Rimbaud?
Poetry is one of the pillars of the town’s cultural policy. There’s a new museum in the old town of Charleville-Mézières, France dedicated to Arthur Rimbaud, one of the country’s most celebrated poets. The coolest part? It’s in an old…
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We Think Writing Is Sexy
So I’m here to tell you that you can make a living as a writer, but you (might) have to let go of some notions of what “making a living as a writer” means. Over at Huffington Post Books, a…
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Time Travel in the Antarctic
In the latest installment of the New York Times‘s Sunday Book Review, Caroline Alexander writes an elegant review of Rebecca Hunt’s Everland, a novel about two expeditions in the Antarctic that take place more than a century apart: Her careful…
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The Joy of Writing
In an exclusive interview with Authorlink, Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants and At the Water’s Edge, talks about research in fiction, story arcs, and the sheer love of writing: I find inspiration everywhere. Some of the snippets of conversation,…