Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
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Brain Training
Great news for avid readers! It turns out that intense reading is good exercise for your brain. Over at Open Culture, Josh Jones writes about a study by Michigan State University Professor Natalie Phillips, who compares the brain activity of participants…
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Found in Translation
Nearly fifteen years after it was published in Spanish, Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s collection of short stories Lovers on All Saints’ Day is now available in English. In an interview with NPR, Vásquez talks about the collection, translation, and the feeling of…
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What’s in a Name?
Back in the day, many writers adopted a pen name to “tell the truth without fear.” For some contemporary writers (e.g. J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith or the enigmatic Elena Ferrante), writing under a pseudonym is still liberating. But are pseudonyms going…
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The Language of Community
The dream of a global literary community is not new. But as globalization has not meant greater political or economic equality, cultural cosmopolitanism has not been guaranteed by instant communication and inexpensive travel. These do, however, present significant new opportunities…
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The Wonderland of Imagination
Who are you?’ Isn’t this what every book asks of us as we chase its characters, trying to find out what they are reluctant to reveal? Is it not also the one essential thing we ask ourselves as human beings,…
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It’s Electric
It’s hard to read The Sunlit Night without feeling as though you’re enveloped in warmth, swathed by the author’s lyricism and imagery. The sensation is one unique to Dinerstein’s hand—and perfectly matched for the sun-soaked Nordic tale of lives intersecting at the top…
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Reading for a Cloudy Day
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova muses on Richard Hamblyn’s The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, which details the true story of Luke Howard, a 19th century English meteorologist whose work was admired…
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The Art of Dwelling on the Past
Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form … and remember that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned. Brevity’s nonfiction blog has posted an overview of John Koenig’s exquisite The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.…
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Reading a Continent
Fear not if you don’t have any vacation plans this summer. Quartz has created a literary playlist of nine contemporary Latin American authors that will utterly transport you.
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The Art of the Matter
Language is a shape-shifting thing. For some, it is purely the written word, and for others, it is movement, color, texture, light. In its art-themed Sunday Book Review, the New York Times explores how five artists react to five different…
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Sonnets and Songs
“All good love songs are sad,” Paul McCartney, who knew, once told this reporter. The mystery is that while what we want is love fulfilled, what we actually feel most deeply about is love frustrated. What do Shakespeare’s love sonnets…
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The Politics of Fiction
Fiction written under an authoritarian or totalitarian government often dares readers to view the work as a critique of that society. In a review of two science fiction works by Cuban authors, Electric Literature takes a look at the surprising…