Strangely in the Middle
If rats then represent terror and chickens innocent striving for something approaching authenticity, humans, for Lispector, are strangely in the middle, often stricken with fear, or handing out terror, but…
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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.
Read All These
Why stuff your body with Thanksgiving leftovers when you could be stuffing your bag with used books? It was another reminder that I will surely die before I read all…
All Mixed Up
Is The Hunger Games feminist? Does it matter? Flavorwire’s Sarah Seltzer wonders whether we’re asking the wrong questions: It seduces us with a good-vs.-evil premise, but then muddies the entire…
Putting One Foot in Front of the Other
Cheryl Strayed has inspired so many readers with her wise sayings, it was only a matter of time before someone collected them. The author of Brave Enough talks to Brian…
Between the Pages
Long since buried and canonized, Charlotte Brontë is now subject to every writer’s worst nightmare. A poem and prose piece penned by a teenaged Brontë have recently been discovered between…
That Thought and Nothing Else
If you’re still waiting for the Muse to show up, look behind you—it might be driving the other direction. Ann Beattie tells the New Yorker how a bumper sticker inspired…
Means to an End
It’s a process that catalyzes us into seeing in a new way, to grasping what may intuitively lie beyond language itself. The Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn asks: what…
So Little Time and Space
In an adapted excerpt from her introduction to 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories over at Lit Hub, Lorrie Moore grasps at the ungraspable reasons we read short stories: This…
Nearer to Nonsense
If “show, don’t tell” were really that great advice, why bother writing anything at all? Slate’s Forrest Wickman makes the case for saying what you mean: Twenty-first-century tastemakers like to…
It’s Real Dangerous
…the verbiage comes to seem obsessive: a compulsion to name, label, and caption which, in heightening the absurdity of words, strips them of their power. In an excerpt from his…
Retracing Steps
Like so many silenced publications before them, Esquire has gone the way of the ear with a new Classics podcast that unearths articles from the magazine’s illustrious eighty-year history. In…