Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
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A Novel Solution
I just wanted to leave this in the world, and see what the world would do with it. Ever wonder what to do with all those extra books around your apartment? Well, Shaheryar Malik came up with an ingenious idea: leave…
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Gwyneth Paltrow’s Favorite Books
When texture and feeling and specificity is expressed so exquisitely in the prose that you feel you must understand the writer. For the New York Times’s “By the Book,” actress Gwyneth Paltrow shares her favorite authors and works of literature, and…
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Thrilling and Bewildering
Her poems’ shifts from the tactile and concrete to the amorphous and the abstract is simultaneously thrilling and bewildering… In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Noemi Press poetry editor Diana Arterian takes a close look at Sarah Vap’s Viability,…
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Oyeyemi’s Luminous Universe
Author Laura van den Berg has glowing words about Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. In her New York Times book review, van den Berg writes: “A collection is, by my lights, a chance…
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Lovely in Person and on the Page
The deeper I get into this life of writing and making things, the more I understand that I don’t know. … As long as I feel like I’m trying to speak as much truth as I possibly can, and people…
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The Art of Losing Isn’t Hard to Master
Just as there is subjective rejection, there’s subjective acceptance—the editor who sparks to your characters, your plot, your manuscript because of their personal experiences—and you want someone who understands your story to be the champion it needs. Let’s be real.…
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Miranda July’s Favorite Things
There’s no law against asking strangers about their lives and feelings, although sometimes it really feels like there is. Do you know which books you’d take with you if you were stranded on an island? Well, Miranda July does. Check…
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Hello! Bonjour! Hola! Hallo!
Interpreting someone’s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. What does a speaker know or not know? What did she intend to convey? Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide…
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Startling Places
For the New York Times, Lydia Kiesling reflects on Sara Majka’s debut collection, Cities I’ve Never Lived In: I assumed right away that I knew exactly what kind of book this would be: a book about arty people with complicated personal…
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Just Dance
Well, that’s the point of being alone—it’s not anything to do with you. It’s about being something in someone else’s life, and no one ever knows the difference, or the truth. That’s why people like bad movies and bad fiction,…
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The Truth about Memory
Once I decided I wasn’t going to stop if I flinched, I figured I was opening myself up to some hard stuff. So, when it came, I kind of expected it. Maybe some of the beautiful moments of my life surprised…
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An Urban Sort of Loneliness
The Lonely City bristles with heart-piercing wisdom. Loneliness, according to Laing, feels “like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.” Later, she admits that at one point during her own hermetic existence in New York, “I felt…