Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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Ladies Drink Free
Whether glamorized or pitied, the figure of the alcoholic writer has long been a subject of cultural fascination. Having written a book on the usual suspects—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al.—Olivia Laing asks the unfortunately necessary follow-up question: okay, but what about the…
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All Press, Good Press
Publicity is a fundamental component of the book-selling process—it’s unlikely a reader will buy something she doesn’t know exists. So why do we find public relations so despicable? In an essay for Jacobin, Jennifer Pan reminds us that capitalism is…
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The Loneliest Art
Does screenwriting qualify as “real” writing? Over at the New Yorker, Richard Brody wonders what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed shot at Hollywood reveals about film as an industry and as an art: Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting-is-writing mistake. It’s…
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Somebody Who Has Found the Words
Recently in the UK, poetry seems to have found its way back into mainstream culture, which of course elicits the question: did it ever leave? Over at Newsweek, Howard Swains examines the reasons we return to poetry even in an…
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The Book You’re Writing
In the latest installment of Little, Brown’s “Ask a Debut Novelist,” Ted Thompson addresses the anxieties that spring eternal from the minds of new writers, perfectionism and the specter of Zadie Smith’s superior talent among them. While quality is certainly a…
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Paradise Locked
In anticipation of this past week’s Hay Festival, fiction luminary Toni Morrison wrote an essay for The Telegraph examining the concept of paradise as it relates to race and class. The novelist locates the promise of this “Utopia for few”…
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Yuppies Read
Now’s your chance to get your very own piece of David Foster Wallace. Today in New York, Sotheby’s art auction house is offering a small collection of letters the post-post-/meta-modern literary great once sent to his old friend JT Jackson,…
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Nothing New Under the Billboard
With its clean, careful shots and enigmatic plot resolutions, Mad Men tends to inhabit a liminal narrative space, as if the same rules of decorum that govern its romanticized 60s society extend their authority to the show’s refined formal characteristics.…
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Remembering the Blue and the Gray
Memorial Day is a time of both national reflection and diverse local tradition. In a piece connecting poetry and community storytelling, The Atlantic offers some literary history in observance of this past weekend’s holiday. Two years after the end of…
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The Life Behind the Stories
Step inside Neil Gaiman’s surreal artistic world with Hayley Campbell’s recently released book examining his personal archives. Drawings, notes, and letters in The Art of Neil Gaiman give cult fans and curious newcomers an intimate insight into the fantasy novelist’s…
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Letterpress and Pictures, Literature and Art
Should art and literature be treated independently? The Paris Review Daily reports that the British Library has recently released an online collection of 1,200 Romantic and Victorian texts in the first phase of a plan to digitize various literary periods.…