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,…
Posts by author
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.
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:…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…