Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
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Writerly Conversation
In a Salon interview, authors Teddy Wayne and Alexandra Kleeman talk to each other about their recent books, character- and world-building, and alienation and anxiety in their novels. “Every story I write begins with a different distribution of knowns and…
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What Makes a Story a Story
Over at the Atlantic, Joe Fassler talks to Alice Mattison about how Grace Paley’s short stories encouraged her to write fiction. Mattison recalls: From Paley, I learned that I could write about lives and feelings like those I knew.
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Lessons from The Little Virtues
For the New Yorker, author Belle Boggs reflects on Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg’s collection of essays, The Little Virtues, and how the book influenced her own parenting philosophy. Boggs writes: The title essay considers what we should teach children—“not the…
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Omniscience Is In
In a New York Times article, Elliott Holt writes about how omniscience is making a comeback in contemporary fiction. She writes: The effects of omniscience are authority and scope; novels with such narrators seem especially confident. The characters may be…
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The Lyrics of Friendship
What is friendship if not learning the song of another’s heart and singing it back to them? In a reflection on friendship and language, Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova explores Eudora Welty’s writings on the topic. Popova writes: “[I]t might be…
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Aesthetics and Poetics
Over at The Walrus, Michael Prior talks with poet Hoa Nguyen about the assessment of poetry, poetic communities in the US and Canada, and the role of silence and space in her own poetry: I see spacing as a way…
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A Novel Debut
Over at the New York Times Book Review, Leslie Jamison and Ayana Mathis write about the excitement surrounding debut novelists’ work. “It’s like hearing an overture at the beginning of a symphony, the introduction of themes and preoccupations that will…
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A Romance with Concision
Can’t wait for Sarah Manguso’s newest book, 300 Arguments? Over at Harper’s Magazine, you can read an essay excerpted from the book about brevity and aphorisms. Manguso writes: Please don’t try to convince me that my romance with concision follows…
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Cats, Comics, and Conservation
Some find it strange that a person known for her novels and poetry would take to writing comic books called Angel Catbird. But I myself don’t find it very strange. Read an excerpt from the talented Margaret Atwood’s first graphic novel, Angel…
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Reading Emotions
There’s nothing that the book world likes to debate more than the differences between literary fiction and commercial or genre fiction. According to a new study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, readers of literary fiction are…
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In Conversation with Jesse Ball
There are two things in writing: one is to say something with the form of what you’re saying, and the other is to say something with the content of what you are saying. … I think content is not completely…
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Time Risk in Hollywood
Screenwriters do the bulk of their work prior to the green light. Cameras not rolling. Trying to get films made. They toil at the wrong end of the time risk curve, taking on time risk in a myriad of forms. …