Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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How to Get Your Book Beach-Ready for Summer
Where are the crossroads between literary and commercial, and would you mind giving us directions? At Lit Hub, Brian Gresko spoke to novelist Miranda Beverly-Whittemore about new endings, labeling a book a beach read, and going “full lit”: Guess what? Your publisher…
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You Keep Using That Word
I do not think it means what you think it means: Do words mean what the dictionary says they mean, or do they gain meaning through the way we use them? Any person without an agenda knows the answer is…
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What’s Lit Got to Do with It
We remember the 80s as decidedly uncool, art included. But shoulder pads and good writing aren’t mutually exclusive: The labels didn’t matter. What mattered was revealing the world and its beleaguered citizens rather than torturing them with edifying or otherwise…
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140 Characters or More
Make sure no one else is awake. Turn off the lights. Your windows can stay open. Now turn on your phone and begin reading. Repeat as necessary each night. Do not stop until the very last word of the very…
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The Great American Sermon
After all, the essay, in its American incarnation, is a direct outgrowth of the sermon: argumentative, insistent, not infrequently irritating. Minimalist prose. Maximalist ideas. A long tradition of anti-intellectualism. Adverbs. At the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham asks what makes an essay American?
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Get ‘Em While They’re Young
This year’s children’s literature has some exceptional bonafides. Over the next few months, a number of acclaimed novelists, including Jane Smiley and Elena Ferrante, will be publishing children’s books. Whether a five-year-old can distinguish between literary and genre fiction, only time…
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False Dichotomy
Can women really have it all? Like, all of it? But how could they possibly have multiple things at the same time? How can they even think human thoughts after they’ve subsumed their corporeal selves into an all-encompassing prison of…
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The Lives of Others
We’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of understanding the person behind the work. For Lit Hub, Heller McAlpin examines a long tradition of writing about writers: There’s a special frisson of pleasure in reading about writers’ early struggles when…
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Don’t Quit Your Day Job
But dip into nearly any of Stevens’s poems, to the last, and be braced by a voice like none other, in its knitted playfulness and in its majesty. For most of his life, Wallace Stevens worked a day job as…
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A Stand-In for New and Difficult Thinking
Clichés are tempting because they do the work of communicating for us. In a manifesto against workshop jargon, Helen Betya Rubinstein warns us of the dangers of sticking to old models: …because you’d have to remember all the way back…
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Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On
This past weekend, thousands of people convened to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The Elizabethan bard’s formal innovations are widely revered as some of the most influential literary developments in history, so much so that we almost overlook…