interview | The Smart Set

A (Stone Cold) Stunner of a Picture

Melinda Lewis — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 12:31:43 +0000

Despite only recently breaching his 20s, director and writer, Pedro Vasquez, a 2024 Drexel University graduate, completed an ambitious project: a film that marries existential anxieties, action-packed sequences, and challenging counterpoints to those with preconceptions about the life of professional wrestlers. Within this interview, we talk about his road to completing the film Slow Dancing […]

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Shehan Karunatilaka Will Kick You Out at Midnight

Sudipto Sanyal — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Ventriloquism “I only became famous in October,” mumbled Shehan Karunatilaka as he leaned on the wall of the Chandni Chowk metro station and lit a cigarette. Here, in downtown Kolkata, with its crumbling office blocks and chaotic sidewalks, the long-haired, eyebrow-pierced writer from Sri Lanka was about as conspicuous as a dirty napkin in a […]

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When the Satanists Moved In

Erica Zelinger — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Writer Paul Crenshaw found himself trying to make sense of the fear that engulfed everything in his 1980s childhood in small-town Arkansas and the world around him. The Cold War. Stranger Danger. Satanic Panic. In his most recent book of essays Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other ’80s Perils, published by The Ohio […]

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Asking What’s Real and What’s Not

Marek Makowski — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 15:48:24 +0000

When I discovered her work, I was searching for a different Madeleine Gross. The days of lockdown wearied me; I lay in bed, at night or during the afternoon or morning (time was unbroken and the same), swiping to find how others had changed. I sought one of my many now-anonymous former coworkers from a […]

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Haunted Memories, Sifted Dreams

Melinda Lewis — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 11:30:00 +0000

Gina Nutt’s Night Rooms is a book of passages. I mean this literally in its form, a collection of nonfiction narrative poems that construct the book, and also metaphorically as each paragraph moves us from one sensation to another, unlocking a series of memories and feelings. Covering Nutt’s childhood, early adolescence, and adulthood, the collection as […]

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Resonating Roles

Byshera Williams — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 15:20:31 +0000

Rolanda D. Bell is an actress and singer from Oakland. Recently, she was featured as Nak in the film Blindspotting (created by Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs). Outside of being very excited about this film, I was pleasantly shocked to see Bell, a plus-sized black woman, in an industry that tends to favor standard size, fair-skinned […]

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Sailing with Michael Andreasen

Melinda Lewis — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 11:30:18 +0000

Michael Andreasen’s first book, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover, is one part Twilight Zone, a hint of Twin Peaks, with a dash of Booshian surrealism. Anchoring his short stories is one of my favorite sensibilities in film and literature: the extraordinary in the ordinary, whether that is making the banal fantastic or normalcy perverse. Below, Andreasen, graciously addresses […]

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In Plain Sight

Byshera Williams — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 11:30:04 +0000

Rafael Casal is a poet, rapper, producer, writer, and actor. Over the last ten years, he and his longtime friend and collaborator, Daveed Diggs, wrote, produced, and starred in their first film, Blindspotting. The story revolves around best friends Collin (Diggs) and Miles (Casal) during the last three days of Collin’s probation. As the days […]

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Have Mercy on Me

Christine Ro — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 12:30:12 +0000

A feverish, drug-addled musician huddles on the floor of his room in Berlin, pecking out his first novel on a typewriter. He’s tormented by the protagonist he’s creating: a mute, misunderstood creature who expresses in violence what he’s unable to communicate in speech. At the same time, this Australian musician is inspired by the artful […]

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Good Graces

Melinda Lewis — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:30:34 +0000

As a child, I believed my 16-year-old babysitter, at the peak of adulthood, had all of the answers one could have. She had hip kicks, cool hair, and was in high school, which I assumed to be the height of “getting it.” She was old enough to understand the complexities of the universe (for me, […]

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