Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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Performing Words
Dutifully we come out for the readings, we put on our thinking faces, we offer our commentary, but behind our pensive stares there remains that clandestine part of us that’s honestly just trying not to fall asleep. Lucky for us, this…
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Defending Herstory
London’s Feminist Library is at risk of being evicted in April due to a rent hike to more than double its former fee. Broadly spoke to some of the women fighting to save their space: “Without the Feminist Library, my…
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Wires Crossed
By this point, the relationship between books and television is complicated enough to merit its own Netflix series. Or its own book. Or maybe both: Like lovers who share an apartment, they’ve started speaking and looking alike.
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Capitalist Fairy Tales
However unbelievable they seem, Nathan Fielder’s doomed interactions with small business owners on Nathan For You are all too painfully real. But in an economic landscape as cockamamy as today’s, they might as well be the work of fantasy: Conditions…
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Coming of Age
The publication of Go Set a Watchman may have cast Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in a new light, but the high school classic and its author will forever occupy an essential spot in the American literary canon. Michiko…
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Really Good Fiction
Infinite Jest recently turned twenty, a birthday so momentous it merited a new edition of the tome for college students to display on their bedside tables. In light of the renewed discussion about David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, D.T. Max…
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Stacks on Stacks
Remind yourself that you are in control. The New Yorker is there for you and not the other way around. It is your feelings that matter in this relationship. Sure, we all subscribe. But who really has time to read…
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Rubbing Elbows
Sometimes it feels like New York isn’t full of interesting people so much as people who are more interesting than you. For BuzzFeed Books, John Wray describes the mediocrity of being surrounded by greatness: Who did I think I was,…
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Eating at the Table of Another
The critic giveth and he taketh away. In his review of Better Living Through Criticism, Jonathon Sturgeon counters A.O. Scott’s aversion to the idea of the critic as parasite: Maybe the loneliness of the American critic stems from his obsession…
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A Place That She Herself Has Imagined
Brooklyn is a place of layers both personal and historical, one that, as Colm Tóibín puts it, is “full of ghosts.” Reflecting on the recent film adaptation of his novel, the Brooklyn author observes one of the borough’s more visible…
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Binge-Watching Bolaño
The latest installment in the trend of adapting the unadaptable is none other than Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, a sprawling, digressive novel to which director Robert Falls has allotted five hours of mixed-media stage time. Performances will begin at Chicago’s Goodman…
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Old Habits
Unplugging is bound to free up some time; spending that time is another matter. After reading Mindful Tech, David M. Levy’s book about how and why we use devices, Matthew J.X. Malady decided to give the simple life a try:…