Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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“We Are Not Robots. We Do What We Can.”
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 question: Shouldn’t there be a way to say, without any…
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Loonier Toons
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 say about teamwork or caring or sharing; on the contrary,…
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For Love of Country
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 campaigning in Washington for the rights of undocumented immigrants, the…
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Nintendo IQ84
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.
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Binary Codes
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 complicated—as storytellers we want to capture and express every nuance,…
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Oldies, Goodies
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: I just get it. However much I admired his work, it had…
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Truth and Beauty
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 to ground imagination in reality: Why is that always the question fiction…
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Haters Gonna Hate
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 least unironically, claim membership. Like the related (and similarly complicated)…
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A Hopeful Construct
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 sense, it was all a hopeful construct.
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Entirely the Person
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 these degrees of separation: It’s still an approximation of who…
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Dog Sees God
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 that summer had been “executed by the state of Florida.”…