Posts by author
Roxie Pell
-
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 easy; I might change my mind two or three times.…
-
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 them, pubes through the ages were nearly invisible: Of course…
-
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 lust, and, above all, the culture of brute violence that…
-
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, Oishi interviews himself about the process of writing Fox Drum…
-
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 blow struck against the idea that reading is a one-way…
-
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 to think; it creates new ways of thinking: Whatever we…
-
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 that language is also a process, one in which layers…
-
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: This shouldn’t work, but it does. Perhaps it’s that the…
-
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 trend toward biographical fiction, Joanna Scutts warns us about the…
-
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 to Claudia Rankine about her poetry collection Citizen, which explores…
-
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 a national robotics competition with a machine made from garbage…
-
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 poetry written in response to political events is somehow less…