Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
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From the Italian
The goal is to deliver something from another language into your own language so people will read it and like it. I think sometimes it’s forgotten that you have to be a good writer in your own language. As part…
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A Literary Homecoming
Author Matthew Neill Null writes at Catapult about a college class on Central Europe that changed the course of his reading and writing life: My new professor, with his reading list of Central and Eastern European literature, had handed me…
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Writing Badly
Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself. Over at the Guardian, writer Toby Litt explores what makes…
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Sidewalk Stanzas
Boston’s City Hall and Mass Poetry, a Massachusetts-based poetry nonprofit, has embarked on an urban art project: They’ve stenciled poems onto Boston’s sidewalks using paint that only appears in the rain. Sara Siegel, the program director at Mass Poetry, says:…
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Coming of Age in New York City
Over at Guernica, Kyle Lucia Wu talks with Stephanie Danler about her new novel, Sweetbitter, and how Danler’s personal experiences as a young woman living in New York City and working in a restaurant overlap with those of her protagonist:…
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Home Sweet Brooklyn
It’s very easy to be anonymous in Brooklyn, but it’s not as easy to make genuine, human connections, or even to form strong connection to this place, because things are constantly changing and constantly moving. In Meet the Regulars: People…
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Imagining the Past
Over at the New Yorker, Lucy Ives writes about how some recent works of fiction challenge conventional definitions of historical fiction by “offer[ing] a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices.” Citing works by Danielle Dutton, Marlon James, and John…
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From Pen to Pentium
For many writers, after all, a word processor was as much an appliance as it was a deeply individualized instrument—more fax machine than fountain pen. … Still, the plastic, glass, and silicon devices had stories to tell, just as did…
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A Home of One’s Own
Jami Attenberg wrote a personal essay in Lenny Letter about finding home in unexpected places: I found myself uttering these words: “If I lived here, I would never want to leave.” No one was more surprised than me when I…
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In Conversation with Lydia Davis
I love the English language. I know some people go into translating because they love foreign languages, but I love English above all, and I enjoy translating these foreign texts into my beloved English. In the first of six-part interview…
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What Is Lost, What Is Found
Mountains loomed in the horizon line. Standard, cliché clouds. After a stretch, green pops of brush. At first, the sediment in the mountains growing up in size was indistinct, all mottled beige, but the layers became more obvious as I…
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Of Ocean and Earth
Over at the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Ocean Vuong’s new collection of heartbreakingly gorgeous poems, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Kakutani writes: There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and…