Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
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The Magic of Dolphins
When I started thinking about dolphins, I realized that they had really touched my heart in a way that I had to look at very carefully. It was a time in my life when I was wondering how I would…
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Too Excited for Words
Have you heard the good news? Singer-songwriter Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, is going to be made into a mini-series. The Guardian reported that Smith will co-write the show with John Logan (who created…
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Think You’re Escaping and Run Into Yourself
Over at The Oyster Review, our very own Rumblr editor Molly McArdle has composed a lovely essay about how rereading old books is a journey back to the past. She writes: The books I revisited were all fantastical and all had…
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On Birds in the Wild
In a hauntingly poignant review of Helen Macdonald’s lovely H Is for Hawk, the Los Angeles Review of Books’s Dinah Lenney writes about her own experience of loss and the turning toward the natural world: In grief, what I found: birds…
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Road Trip, Anyone?
Galm’s writing mimics the hyperreality of dreams, and the novel’s penetrative heat is palpable in descriptions of highway rest stops and “the flatness of the valley…the mountains in the far distance like figments behind the haze.” In a review of…
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The Art of Breaking Free
It’s difficult to break free. It’s difficult to think about what’s next and face the unknown. Over at The Barnes & Noble Review, The Rumpus’s Essays Editor Emeritus Roxane Gay interviews the talented Karolina Waclawiak about her latest novel, The Invaders—women in…
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Words, Music, Words, Music … and Glass
He is one of the only artists … who actually seemed to enjoy his journey, both spiritual and musical. Plus, he seemed to learn something profound with each step of his way, until completely formed as an artist. In a…
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The Magic of Realism
I think the word realism hides our individual subjectivities of reality. In an interview with the Nashville Review, the talented Claire Vaye Watkins talks about her forthcoming science fiction novel Gold Fame Citrus, the real and unreal, life and art, and…
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Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty
I never recoiled, in that first season, to hear the nice people on the bus say “beautiful baby,” to us in reverent tones. It’s a thanksgiving for safe passage, a prayer for all new defenseless things. But after a few months…
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Poetry & Paradoxes
When I loved him it felt like light / Coming out of my skin. I don’t mean this / In a good way. In the Boston Review, Lisa Olstein provides a lovely prelude to a sampling of devastatingly beautiful poems…
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Seuss, Serendipity, (and a Secret)
The publication of Dr. Seuss’s What Pet Should I Get? is a welcome surprise for kids of all ages. But the question of why the book was not published during Seuss’s lifetime remains unanswered. Was it lost in the shuffle?…
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The Secrets of Paris
To form secrets with a city is to treat it like a lover, to imagine you know it better than anyone, but to still expect it to surprise you for years to come. It is the secret to all rewarding…