How Should A Person Read?
While Tim Parks doesn’t want to be prescriptive, he offers his own techniques as inspiration: Getting a sense of the values around which the story is organizing itself isn’t always…
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Roxie Pell
287 posts
Roxie Pell is a student at Wesleyan University, where she writes for Wesleying and The Argus and tweets hilarious nuggets of pure wisdom @jonathnfranzen.
Down There
In light of Plush, Marilyn Minter’s new book of pubic hair photography, Vulture looks back on the history of the female bush in Western art. Like the women who owned…
For Gentlemen Only
The lack of literary interest in the game is surprising, since it serves as the perfect lens through which to examine our fractured state: its ingrained prejudices, gender distortions, money…
Slow and Steady
It took Gene Oishi 50 years to write his debut novel, a story about Japanese American identity and family during and after World War II. Over at The Nervous Breakdown,…
Between the Lines
While some bibliophiles hold books as sacred artworks to be carefully preserved, others can’t read without a little back-and-forth. Laura Miller makes a case for defacing pages: Marginalia is a…
Ourselves and Our World
Sensational headlines declaiming the death of the humanities often misunderstand what the humanities actually are. Paul A. Kottman explains that the practice of analyzing texts doesn’t just teach us how…
Ways of Speaking
In his seminal book Ways of Seeing, critic and novelist John Berger deconstructed the framework of presuppositions through which we view visual images. Over at the Guardian, he reminds us…
Writing Screen
Book-to-movie adaptations are nothing new, but does the transition work the other way around? Over at Electric Literature, Tobias Carroll examines the capacity of prose to put film on paper:…
Back to the Future
The past is always a story, impossible to remember without molding it into a narrative that privileges some details over others and colors memory with tone. Reflecting on a recent…
Outrage Laced With Vulnerability
When the grand juries failed to indict Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo, they added to a lineage of injustices enacted against black people in America. Rumpus contributor Kaveh Akbar speaks…
Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Joshua Davis’s Spare Parts
Everyone loves a good underdog story, but Joshua Davis isn’t going to give us one. His new book Spare Parts, released this Tuesday, profiles four Mexican American teenagers who won…
Healing Words
This past week has seen an outpouring of poetry responding to the disappointment, violence, and trauma spurred by the Ferguson decision. Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon challenges the notion that…