The Neverending Story
For years, film buffs have been devouring companion material to the original works that captured their interest—deleted scenes, commentary, bloopers, most eagerly that much-loved paean to auteurism, the director’s cut.…
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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.
Unlocking the New Yorker
Those little blue padlocks are gone for good. Starting this week, newyorker.com will release all its content to the public, free of charge, until summer’s end. Unfortunately for subscription commitment-phobes,…
Gateway Literature
Over at the New Yorker, Stephen Burt reviews Ariel Schrag’s Adam, a graphic novel about a straight man who finds himself in the midst of New York’s queer scene. Almost as…
Party of One
Social media is a cruel machine, propelled by our desire to keep up appearances and affirmed by a strange, voyeuristic capital of likes and favorites. While Facebook can at times…
Kickstarting “Desire”
Yony Leyser, director of the documentary about William S. Burroughs, is making a feature film about Berlin’s queer community, and he needs your help to crowdfund it. Over at Indiewire, Leyser…
Privilege vs. Privilege
In an excerpt from her book The Shelf, Phyllis Rose illustrates the systematic dismissal of women writers through the imagined figure of Prospero’s Daughter: wealthy and educated yet burdened by…
Who Are We Writing For?
Sandwiched between fictions on one side and instructions on the other, a woman is often denied the breathing room necessary to find her individual sexuality. In a conversation at the…
An Agnostic, Chortling Freelance Space-Yahoo
Amid all the meanings and uses that give a word its weight, it’s easy to forget that language is ultimately a system of arbitrary signs. Lexicographer Paul Dickson’s new book…
A Serious Man
In a recently tweeted series of amateur photos, artist and writer Szilvia Molnar satirizes the figure of the cool male writer so often conveyed in author portraits by the presence…
Whose Word?
In the midst of debate surrounding the Washington Redskins’s trademark cancellation, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg reminds us that a word is never completely free of its etymology. Rooted in a tradition…
We Respectfully Decline
At Guernica, Alexandria Peary observes a fine but lethal distinction between being declined and being rejected, a difference that had very real effects on the literary ambitions of nineteenth-century female writers.…
By Its Cover
Jennifer Weiner’s recent claim that a serious author photos indicate serious literature is submited to scientifically unsound empirical testing over at Slate. Comparing the head shots of “Women’s Lit” writers to those of “Literary…