Laura Creste

Emojis have overtaken my life in a big way. As much I like sending long wordy texts, I appreciate the understatement of my favorite emoticons. Your friend flakes again on your plans for drinks? Hit him with the judgmental face. Another friend…

December is an ideal time for settling in with a thick read. A well-picked book is essential whether you're in for a long plane ride home for the holidays and you need a distraction, or your extended family has gotten into a political debate after a…

If you’re a fan of short, memorable, and unsettling stories, Sara Lippmann’s debut collection Doll Palace (Dock Street Press) is for you. A Creative Writing graduate of Brown University, and New School MFA, Lippmann has been writing for a long time.…

November is my favorite time of year for a lot of reasons. Thanksgiving is imminent. The air is just starting to get frosty, and it still feels like a novelty to expect the first snowfall before the bleak post-holiday season winter sets in, and…

I know I've been too sensitive my whole life — I know this because people who love me will often remind me in the spirit of being kind, helpful even. The point is I have some experience in getting my heart damaged. But I also have experience in how…

It’s kind of shocking that no one has made a documentary about Joan Didion. That is, until now. The project, titled We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live, was announced Wednesday morning on Vogue, a magazine for which Didion used to write — and…

Kindles and other kinds of e-readers have been around for years, and I still haven’t made the switch from print to screen. I don’t see this as a particularly passionate or political decision — it’s just a preference. Not everyone, however, feels…

Warning: You're picking up a book that's... well, weird. Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper (Dorothy Project) is a strange, funny, super-engaging book by an ex-pat author living in Germany. Zink writes adultery and eco-terrorism and odd plot turns; all of…

If you're the bookish person in your circle who likes to hear about new talent before anyone else, here's news that you're going to want to put on your radar. Look out for 25-year-old Emma Cline's debut novel, The Girls, which just sold to Random…

One of my favorite things about Lena Dunham is that she's unabashedly political. While on her hugely popular book tour for Not That Kind of Girl , (really, it sold out insanely fast for a book tour) Dunham is signal-boosting not only some of her…

Writers have long held reputations for being heavy drinkers — a stereotype that’s not entirely undeserved. (Thank you, Hemingway and Fitzgerald — and that's just a start.) While I admire the early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of writer, I doubt I will…

Maybe there's been some misunderstanding about Banned Books Week, the stretch of the calendar that's supposed to rail against censorship rather than encourage it. One school didn't get the memo: Last week, Highland Park High School in Dallas banned…