Posts by author
Roxie Pell
-
Stranger than Fiction
The death of the novel has been argued and rebutted and argued again. Drawing from David Shields‘s book of literary criticism, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Alexander Nazaryan wonders whether the essay might do a better job: Reality Hunger argues that…
-
The Other Brontë Girl
She was the Khloé Kardashian of nineteenth century literature, the Michelle Williams of her girl group, her family’s invisible Zeppo Marx. Over at Flavorwire, Sarah Seltzer makes a case for the Brontë sisters’ own personal Ringo: Nothing sums up her…
-
Oceans 2014
If your oddly specific New Year’s Resolution is to watch and read everything Steven Soderbergh watched and read in 2014, here’s a handy guide to all the sex, lies, and videotape your year has in store.
-
Treatment as Metaphor
In our daily efforts to stay healthy, to invent solutions for staving off death, have we already put ourselves in treatment for diseases yet to come? Conner Habib writes about his cancer diagnosis over at The Stranger, challenging Susan Sontag’s…
-
Tooting Your Own Horn
Should writers retweet their own praise? Insofar as Twitter is a platform for self-promotion, sharing positive reviews seems logical—but when a publishing medium does double duty as a sphere of social interaction, this logic gets complicated: Twitter, as a public…
-
His Audio-Only Materials
Citizens of the multiverse rejoice: Philip Pullman has released another tale from the world of His Dark Materials, the fantasy trilogy for which fans have long awaited a fourth installment. Narrated by Bill Nighy and available only in audio format,…
-
Getting Difference Wrong
In an interview with Salon, the always-wise Roxane Gay offers her opinions on Bill Cosby, Lena Dunham, and the challenges of writing characters whose experiences differ from one’s own: We can imagine spaceships and different planets and aliens, but when…
-
Lighten Up
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a light neo-noir comedy, just like the Pynchon novel that inspired it. Despite our eagerness to overanalyze film adaptations of complicated books, Katie Kilkenny warns us not to take this one too seriously: Inherent…
-
Mr. Difficult, Mr. Easy
Is Moby-Dick really a tougher read than Fifty Shades of Grey? Noah Berlatsky argues that the distinction depends on the reader: …”difficulty” seems to hold out the possibility of more objective standards—to assure us that these books, over here, by…
-
Better than the Book
Film adaptations can take their source novels in a million different directions, some innovative, others painfully off the mark. John Colapinto evaluates the movie versions of different Nabokov stories for the New Yorker, exploring their various formal challenges and triumphs.
-
Something Short and Weird
Electric Literature has announced the upcoming debut of its weekly online magazine Okey-Panky, a cocktail of short, experimental writing brewed to cure the Monday blues: Okey-Panky would be dedicated to brevity, eccentricity, and dark humor. It would publish every Monday…