LIKES
LIKES Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
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I’ve written before about the magic I find, as a writer and reader, in the world of the school as a setting for fiction. Like most of my predilections when it comes to literature, gravitating toward this world isn’t really a conscious choice. But I think it has to do with the change that’s part of a classroom setting—that’s in fact part of that setting’s very definition. There’s a shaping of selves, intentional and otherwise, inherent in a school that creates a whole host of dramatic possibilities.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum reads her story from the October 9, 2017, issue of the magazine. Bynum is the author of two novels, “Madeleine is Sleeping” and “Ms. Hempel Chronicles.” Her story “The Erlking” was included in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” issue, in 2010.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum born born 1972 is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, the Georgia Review, and the Best American Short Stories 2004 and 2009. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by the New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
-Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
LIKES
“Likes,” is a father-daughter narrative that takes place at a particularly fraught moment in the daughter’s early adolescence. She’s eleven, and “difficult to talk to.” She’s most comfortable communicating through posts on Instagram. Do you get the sense that social media and the Internet do more to assuage the pain of the early teen-age years or intensify it?
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LIKES Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
LIKES Sarah Shun-lien Bynum