Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
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A Circus, a Kiss
The circus was small, a little tent in the center of a field, but of course we didn’t know it was small, we didn’t know there were bigger circuses in other places. We didn’t even know there were other places.…
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Digital Emotions
Over at the Paris Review Daily, Wei Tchou explores writers’ presentation of their emotions via social media, and what that means for how their work is judged. Tchou concludes: Overblown emotional posturing will go on, despite the occasional backlash, so long…
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Nostalgia’s Record
At the New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich writes an ode to Other Music, a New York City record shop that recently closed its doors after more than twenty years in business. For Petrusich, the store was more than a place to buy music;…
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Defiantly Diski
Over at the New York Times, author Heidi Julavits reviews the late Jenny Diski’s memoir, In Gratitude: While I couldn’t read “In Gratitude” without a persistent lump in my throat, and without the persistent awareness that its author was ……
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Starting in the Middle
In an interview with Flash Frontier, Tara Laskowski, senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, talks about her new short story collection Bystanders, the line between fiction and reality, the present tense, and the appeal of flash fiction: I don’t often like to wrap…
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The Unknowable in Translation
In an Electric Literature article about the English translation of Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner, Ilana Masad explores the mysteries of translated fiction: Approaching a translated book is like drawing near a tamed animal. … But…
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Reading against Time
As a child, I loved it when a book took me somewhere else. I still do, but I’m more surprised and grateful now to be transported by words on a page from one world to another. Perhaps because, as grown-ups,…
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In Conversation with Sara Majka
If you’re delicate with people, if you listen to them just right and give them the space you think they need and are always kind to them, then that’s not closeness, not intimacy. But I can’t help it, I want…
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The Key of Novels
For The Believer Logger, Prashanth Ramakrishna, Theodore Gioia, and Claire Boyle ask the question: if novels were music, in which key would they be written? The post characterizes a couple of musical keys and gives examples of corresponding works of fiction. F.…
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Reading Books in Bars
At Bustle, Lindsay Merbaum writes about her experiences reading books at bars and how some men feel threatened by the presence of a single woman reading: Perhaps what is so subversive is not just the aloneness of a woman at…
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Karaoke for a Cause
The New York Times writes about how Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, overcame her fear of singing in public to raise money for a nonprofit that helps orphans in Nepal. Gilbert recalls: I said to myself, “You’re not…
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In Conversation with Rebecca Solnit
Hope for me… just means… a coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen, and maybe there’s room for us to intervene. And that we have to let go of the certainty people seem to…