Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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Gotta Serve Somebody
In an excerpt from his recently released book Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas, Adam Kirsch positions David Foster Wallace as a quintessentially American writer: self-conscious and ironic, but at the same time frenzied, earnest, and above all…
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So Little Has Changed
Following the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson for shooting and killing Michael Brown, Edwidge Danticat reflects on the overwhelming occurrence of police brutality against people of color: Today, one might generously refer to such acts as micro-aggressions.…
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Love in the Library
What is it about the stacks that gets everyone so hot and bothered? Over at The Millions, Elisabeth Cohen explores the Mary/Magdalene dichotomy in the figure of the female librarian: The whole good-natured romp of it bespeaks a clear message:…
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Known Pleasures
In the wake of So This Is Permanence, a recently released archive of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis’s notebooks, Jillian Mapes reflects on why artists’ scribblings mean so much to fans: “It’s a human reaction to see handwritten things, as…
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Brecht in Love
Who would’ve thought Bertolt Brecht would turn out to be such a romantic? While his newly released Love Poems are surprisingly erotic compared to his better-known plays, they retain that Marxist flair we know and love: Brecht’s love poems might…
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FOUND Book Release Party in LA!
If you’re in Los Angeles this Saturday, stop by the Bootleg Theater to celebrate the release of FOUND Magazine: THE EARLY YEARS, a compilation of the best stuff from the first issues of a magazine that collects found objects of…
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Light Reading
Why do readers love to hate the Times’s Style section? While many of its trend pieces are guilty of the same transgressions committed elsewhere in mainstream media, a history of misogyny and homophobia directed at lifestyle journalism suggests our contempt goes…
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Purity Forthcoming
Jonathan Franzen will release another sweeping narrative titled Purity in September of next year, to the edification of serious intellectuals nationwide. While Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux president Jonathan Galassi promises a “multigenerational American epic” that will deal with the ambitious…
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Year One of Day One
Whether Amazon proves friend or foe to the literary cause, its year-old literary journal Day One seems to be putting everyone in an awkward position. Boris Kachka covers its birthday party for Vulture: Genres sell briskly as e-books, while the…
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Stories That Care
Reflecting on 20 successful years of Chicken Soup for the [Insert Identity Here] Soul, Katy Waldman explains why the same clichés get us every time: Despite the growth of the self-help market, has the recession, or irony, destroyed Chicken Soup’s…
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The Rules are There
In his new book The Sense of Style, brain scientist Steven Pinker calls for a relaxation of English grammar rules. While the Daily Beast’s review praises Pinker for rejecting the false dichotomy between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, the New Yorker…
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Fail Worse
If our current understanding of Beckett’s “fail better” command implies eventual success, what of failure whose endgame is really just failure? Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon makes a case for the value of failure itself (future success optional): When a…