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Roxie Pell

Roxie Pell is a student at Wesleyan University, where she writes for Wesleying and The Argus and tweets hilarious nuggets of pure wisdom @jonathnfranzen.
  • Roxie Pell

    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 ready also to soar or break loose or achieve some…

  • Roxie Pell

    Less Room

    New York is the worst. What are all these writers still doing here? My years spent in New York (where I had also grown up), had made it clear to me there was less and less room for failure in…

  • Roxie Pell

    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 of my books, that my descendants will one day be…

  • Roxie Pell

    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 thing in the gray fog of war.

  • Roxie Pell

    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 Lehrer about growth, fear, and moving forward: All the best…

  • Roxie Pell

    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 the pages of a book that belonged to the Victorian…

  • Roxie Pell

    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 her story, “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowgirl”: I thought,…

  • Roxie Pell

    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 makes an essay literary?

  • Roxie Pell

    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 is life itself, surprising and not entirely invited. And yet…

  • Roxie Pell

    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 think of themselves as beyond highbrow vs. lowbrow—that monocle popped…

  • Roxie Pell

    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 new book published in the New Yorker, Dennis Lim analyzes what…

  • Roxie Pell

    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 their latest installment, Rumpus friend and contributor Nick Flynn discusses…