Posts by author
Roxie Pell
-
The Neverending Story
Did Harry Potter turn us into serial readers? Alexander Chee suggests J.K. Rowling and Karl Ove Knausgaard aren’t all that different: We are all after that word-lust, the novel that makes us want to read it as quickly as possible,…
-
Places Where Art is Made
We often look to metaphor for guidance in our constant search for the how and why of writing. In an essay at The Millions comparing writing to running, Nick Ripatrazone explains that training is not just an analogy for his creative…
-
The Fault in Our Sentences
Hit young adult novels may spread like wildfire, but they don’t grow on trees. The Times profiles Julie Strauss-Gabel, a YA editor known for whipping her writers into shape: The last thing you want is an author saying, ‘That’s what’s…
-
More Lovely and More Temperate
There’s a lot to get excited about and offended by when reading Shakespeare with a feminist eye. NPR interviewed Tina Packer about her new book Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays, which chronicles how the playwright’s portrayal…
-
Quote Unquote
The benefits of quotation marks may seem obvious, but are there drawbacks? Over at The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark makes the case for leveling the linguistic playing field: One is potentially offensive, controversial, even incendiary; the other is simple reportage.…
-
Ideas Perish
In the past few weeks, two bloggers have been murdered in Bangladesh for writing critically about Islam. Reflecting on the deaths of Washiqur Rahman and Avijit Roy, George Packer argues in favor of intellectual freedom: The problem with free speech…
-
The Idiot Follows
Scary movie of the hour It Follows is peppered with intertextual references to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Ben Apatoff looks for the connection (if there is one): If anything, The Idiot enhances It Follows more than it represents it, augmenting the…
-
It’s the Lil Things
Illustrator Evan Lorenzen has successfully created the cutest book you’ll ever read. Titled Life’s Lil Pleasures, the wee volume enumerates universally pleasant experiences like “eating cereal out of your enemy’s skull” on pages smaller than your enemy’s thumb.
-
Make Them Pay
They say print journalism is dying because it’s inconvenient and expensive. At the Atlantic, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti makes a case for jacking up the price even more.
-
Clean Reader, Dirty World
When the Clean Reader app tried to censor books for profanity, writers were understandably pissed. The creators responded by removing their catalogue, but does their technology have implications for the future of intellectual property?
-
Redefining the Commons
A library is rarely ever just a library, often evolving alongside the community it serves. The Lacuna Project is taking this idea literally by building a library made entirely of books for this year’s Bay Area Book Festival. Festival-goers will…
-
Ponies Not Included
Rumpus illustrator A.D. Puchalski has two new comics hot off the press and available for your viewing pleasure. Tough is a stand-alone featuring “inter-dimensional travel, isolation, fear and 80’s Japanese pop music.” Meadow Vol 1 is about ponies. Need we say more?