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…
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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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…