Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
-
House on Fire
At the Guardian, Marta Bausells interviews Idra Novey about her life as a translator, the notion of vanishing, and the freedom of speaking another language. On writing her novel, Ways to Disappear, Novey recalls: I wanted to surprise myself and burn…
-
Painting a Word Picture
In a column for SmokeLong’s “Why Flash Fiction?” series, author Anne Weisgerber compares writing flash fiction to painting: I realized I could craft flash miniatures that added up to something bigger if I intended them to, like dabs in a…
-
Born of a Limitless Imagination
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ilana Teitelbaum writes a glowing review of Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, praising Oyeyemi’s singular voice. Teitelbaum writes: “The dazzle of Oyeyemi’s technique fully engages…
-
Lidia Yuknavitch on Becoming
For Lenny Letter, Suleika Jaouad talks with Lidia Yuknavitch about suffering, writing, and living artfully. Yuknavitch says: I’m trying to help us remember that we invent our own beauty and our own paths and our own crooked, weird ways of doing…
-
Learning and Loving in French
Supposedly, the best way to master a foreign language is to fall in love with a native speaker. Language, in delineating a boundary that can be transgressed, is full of romantic potential. … If first languages are reservoirs of emotion,…
-
In Conversation with Elizabeth Strout
I love all my characters; every single person I write about, I love. So as I write them, I don’t care how badly they misbehave, because they are who they are, they do what they do. In an interview with…
-
Braving the Cold
As both a storyteller and a stylist, Braverman is remarkably skilled, with a keen sense of visceral detail … that borders on sublime. Over at the New York Times, Bronwen Dickey has written a powerful review of Blair Braverman’s debut…
-
Swimming in Sprinkles
The Museum of Ice Cream promises to tap into childlike memories of summer days and ice cream cones. It combines those dreams with adult spending power: In the gift shop, premium sprinkles are sold for $11, next to $33 cone-shape…
-
The Art of Memory
It is optimistic in terms of fiction and young adult fiction to propose a world in which there is healing, and in which healing exists, because complete or perfect healing doesn’t exist in the real world. But there is the…
-
Obviously the Work of Artists
Director Mark Osborne describes to Vulture how he adapted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince into an animated film: “When you’re reading the book, you’re told over and over again in the text, ‘These drawings aren’t very good,’ and you’re actually being tricked…
-
Writing Truth
Over at the Los Angeles Times, Colin Dickey explores the idea of the contemporary American essay as a vehicle for truth. Citing essayists such as John D’Agata, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson, Dickey writes: How do you know…
-
Belles of the Box Office
The multifaceted Kirsten Dunst is going to direct a new film version of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and the lovely Dakota Fanning is set to star in it, the Guardian reports. “Dunst has co-written the film with Nellie Kim,…