Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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A Closer Look
That perfect movie moment is really the sum of countless cinematic cues coming together to make us think and feel. Tony Zhou’s video series “Every Frame a Painting” examines how (and when) these techniques of filmmaking work. We’ve always been…
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Actively Seeking Words
How do you spot a successful writer? Over at Lit Hub, Shelley A. Leedahl explains how going pro can look a lot like going broke: After all, I do have a career. It just doesn’t pay.
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In Rainbows
The silver screen used to be a lot more colorful. Before Technicolor was an option, hand-painted black-and-white film produced vibrant, surreal images the likes of which the world had never seen. Joshua Yumibe looks into the invention born of necessity.
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Quit Your Day Job
The writing life ain’t cheap. Longtime Rumpus friend and contributor Antonia Crane has declared this the “Summer of Love: Stop Stripping, Start Writing” and she can’t make it happen without us. Help her raise the money to attend Bread Loaf and Byrdcliffe Art Colony this…
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What You See
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book Between the World and Me is a letter addressed to his son that America needs to read. New York profiles the author, whose fearless writing about race continues to hold readers accountable to history: Coates’s writing…
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Form Over Function
Will 2015 be the year of the short story? Probably not. But Ben Marcus is making sure it will at least be a year of some short stories. Chin up.
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No Excuses
Because…the Internet exists! Because is this really the first time in your two (or, heaven forbid, three) literate decades on this planet that it’s occurred to you to seek out brain padding by AN ENTIRE HALF of the population? Alanna…
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Critical, Dialectical, Skeptical, Desimplifying
Writers, Sontag believed, if they are any good at all, are obliged to try to understand the forces that shape us. They seek to give us a more truthful sense of things, a more nuanced sense of the world we…
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We Wish to Go to the Festival
After 13 years, another Milan Kundera novel has been translated into English for all us provincials who never learned French. At Slate, Benjamin Herman praises The Festival of Insignificance for its lighthearted wisdom: Insignificance is the work not of a grumpy old…
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Truly, Zero
To write a book like Mislaid, you have to simultaneously be aggressively assured of your own cultural experience and have, truly, zero fucks to give. VICE talks to Nell Zink about process, practice, and poor old Jonathan Franzen.
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Do It Like They Do on The Discovery Channel
Even the animal kingdom is more progressive than the US. Penguins have been forming same-sex romantic relationships for as long as penguins have existed, and none of their compatriots ever batted a wing. The Dodo looks back at some of…