Roxie Pell is a student at Wesleyan University, where she writes for Wesleying and The Argus and tweets hilarious nuggets of pure wisdom @jonathnfranzen.
Without readers, for better or worse, writers would have no one to answer to but themselves. But readers sure do ask a lot of questions. Now, writers are asking this…
Children’s television has taken a turn for the educational, but it is still television. Might as well make it good: Unlike contemporary cartoons, Looney Tunes didn’t have a thing to…
Junot Díaz, whose literary portraits of his home country are by turns critical and sympathetic, has been deemed unpatriotic by the Dominican Republic’s consul in New York, Eduardo Selman. After…
Does anyone go on book tours anymore? Should they? Over at the Atlantic, Noah Charney makes the case for preserving the institution, if only for the three people who showed…
The world is a horrible place, full of bleak scenes and ghastly characters. Fill your eyeballs instead with the infinitely more appealing magical realist world of this Murakami-inspired video game.
No identity is visible from just one angle. Corinne Manning explains the importance of Alison Bechdel‘s “double representation”: It’s not that there are stories that are impossible to tell, just…
If great art is supposed to be surprising, do great writers have to change? At The Millions, Drew Nellins Smith wonders whether there can be too much of a good thing:…
Fiction is, by definition, made up. We know this, yet still we try to “figure out” where stories come from. At Lit Hub, Leslie Pietrzyk wonders why readers are so eager…
Some movies just aren’t all that good. A.O. Scott makes the case for film snobbery: You see the problem. “Snob” is a category in which nobody would willingly, or at…
If writing can’t be taught, why do we spend so much time talking about it? Jayne Anne Phillips chimes in on the MFA debate: Life does not ‘tenure’ anyone. In that…
More than just a biopic, The End of the Tour is a movie about the interconnected relationships between writer, reader, and subject. The Yale Herald talks to Donald Margulies about…
A preacher cares for his daughter’s child while she has a nervous breakdown in a foreign land. A teenager watches her mother slowly die. Another teen mourns his father, who…