Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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YA Television
This summer’s debate over young adult literature has raised questions ranging from whether adults should read YA to what even counts as thee genre in the first place. The New Yorker’s television critic Emily Nussbaum extends these questions to the…
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All Grown Up
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has a creepy new book cover presumably intended to attract older readers, giving another stir to the pot of YA literature that may or may not be OK for adults to read. In the New…
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Maintaining Human Life
Writing may be hard work, but it isn’t the kind that pays the bills. Tillie Olsen’s seminal Silences wonders just what kind of work writing really is, and who has the privilege to do it: Though access to education has…
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All Are Bad
We’ve all read at least one: from “Against YA” to “Against Happiness,” essays that promise to dismiss entire abstract concepts using only rhetoric make for great click-bait. In The New Yorker, Ivan Kreilkamp explains why we keep overstating the case:…
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Straight Outta Gotham
On August 18, hip-hop and comic book nerds alike convened to celebrate the release of Volume 2 of Ed Piskor’s The Hip-Hop Family Tree, a history of the genre in graphic novel-form. In the Daily Beast, Daniel Genis explains how…
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Out of the Binders and Into the Refrigerators
The success of The Magicians trilogy stems in part from its self-awareness. Lev Grossman wields his familiarity with fantasy genre fiction to critique and alter the usual formula. So why do his female characters all serve the same purpose? …he’d…
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Gratification Be Postponed
Although it never garnered the intellectual prestige reserved for his contemporary Walter Benjamin’s critical zingers, Stefan Zweig’s work has recently enjoyed a revival at the hands of two publishers. Zweig’s legacy is that of a conflicted yet devoted proponent of…
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Thinking About Tweeting About Working on My Novel
Artist Cory Arcangel recently curated a collection of tweets containing the phrase “working on my novel” to produce a book of the same name. The New Yorker’s Mark O’Connell wonders why—why he did it, why they tweeted it, and why…
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Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow, Nobrow
Critics have been locked in debate over the Internet’s effect on cultural production and reception for as long as most millennials can remember, exclamations like “democratized content” and “death of the novel” appearing at every click and turn. In this…
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A Book of One’s Own
Inspired by a reader’s powerful response to hir novel Roving Pack, Sassafras Lowrey teamed up with Hugh Ryan, founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, to curate the Queer Book Diorama Show, a collection of dioramas based on books…
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Amazon Continues Attempts to Enlist Authors
Last week, Amazon issued an update outlining its position in the ongoing Amazon-Hachette war from a financial standpoint. While its argument that lowering e-book prices will sell more copies is certainly compelling, the New Yorker’s Vauhini Vara explains why authors…
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Keep Failing
Don’t let that stack of rejection letters get you down. For writers of all kinds—would-be, struggling, under-appreciated, even critically acclaimed—failure is part of the job description. At the New York Times, Stephen Marche describes a writing profession riddled with disappointment and…