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…
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Stephanie Bento
218 posts
Stephanie Bento is a writer, classical cellist, and photographer living in Washington, DC. In her writing, she is interested in exploring the musicality of sound and form, and our connection to time and place. Find out more about her creative work at saudadebelle.com, or say hello/bonjour on Twitter @saudadebelle.
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…