Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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21st Century Magical Realist
Beyond the obvious fact of when it was written or published, what does it mean for literature to be contemporary? Is a work’s relevance determined by market trends and cultural currents? In her monthly advice column for Electric Literature, Elisa…
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A Whole Host of Western Woes
True, a marital murder-suicide does take place on the way, but it’s an act of calculated altruism, done for the good of the group. For the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz reviews Lionel Shriver’s twelfth novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047.
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All the Time Dissolving
Wherever the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, Geoff Dyer has long since crossed it. For Hazlitt, Kyle Chayka talked to the author of White Sands about the continuum of the critical and the narrative: If people call it an essay…
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Unstuck in Time
Despite its uncanny salience in the context of this most recent wave of social injustice and protest, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was written well before the #BlackLivesMatter movement began. Far from a coincidence, the book’s resonance is a product of…
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The Hope Whose Death It Announces
Poetry is defined by a failure to live up to the hype it generates, promising divine transcendence through a medium that is essentially human. This is the paradox Ben Lerner articulates in his dissertation on The Hatred of Poetry. At…
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You’d Prefer Not To
The Internet has been abuzz with grammatically incorrect chatter since the New York Times recently published an article heralding the end of the period. But Flavorwire’s Jonathon Sturgeon doesn’t expect that little dot to go anywhere anytime soon: Bilefsky’s piece…
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But for Man’s Absence
Released this May, director Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 sci-fi novel High-Rise converts the dystopian work into a tableau of striking visuals made all the more seductive by the presence of elegant Internet boyfriend du jour Tom Hiddleston.…
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Oh I’m Sorry, Did I Break Your Concentration?
James Patterson’s new imprint promises to solve our modern conflict between reading and time. But the problem it diagnoses may be more for writers than for readers: Does Patterson want to produce garbage books for what he presumes are garbage…
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Thinking about the Past as If It Were the Future
Chuck Klosterman’s new book, But What If We’re Wrong, theorizes how today will appear in the history books. But how will his own work hold up? The further in the future you peer the more impossible it is to anticipate what…
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A Young Nation’s Game
The Annual Library Budget Survey, published last week, found that libraries around the world have varying growth expectations for the coming year, with North American libraries tending toward negative. On the plus side, libraries in developing countries (with developing markets) are…
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Signifying Nothing
Shakespeare’s texts are anything but stagnant, often taking on new meanings depending on the context in which they’re experienced. In an excerpt from The Maximum Security Book Club, Mikita Brottman describes her experience of teaching Shakespeare in a maximum security…
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Whisper Sweet Nothings
With every year you can hear a celebrity narrate Moby-Dick for $14.95, audiobook sales account for increasingly greater shares of publishing houses’ revenues. Listen up.