Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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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. To accept this practice is to acknowledge the impossibility of…
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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, the site will then transition to a metered paywall system…
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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 interesting as the novel’s contents is its publicity: where trans…
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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 feel like a digital cocktail party devoid of any significant…
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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 explains his desire to deglamorize the city’s dark underground scene…
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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 the demands of a family life whose quotidian challenges, having…
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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 Nervous Breakdown, Rumpus contributor Ashley Perez and author Cris Mazza…
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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 “Authorisms—Words Wrought by Writers” chronicles some of the most dynamic…
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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 of a cigarette. Having noticed a discrepancy between the portrayal of…
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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 of spectacle and minstrelsy, the use of a racial slur…
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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. While to decline a submission implies thoughtful deliberation over that…
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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 Fiction” best-sellers, Eliza Berman discovers an unexpected trend in the…