Room

Entertaining the entire world is a lot harder—and more expensive—than you might think, and over the decades the Entertainment Industrial Complex has developed strategies for mitigating those costs. In television, one of the great cost-cutting techniques is the “bottle episode,” an episode set in a single location and involving a limited cast. This allows it […]

Hollywood’s biggest, glitziest, and longest night of the year has come and gone. Chris Rock went there at an Academy Awards® show that didn’t shy away from politics. Rather than avoiding or ignoring the #OscarsSoWhite controversy over the lack of diversity among this year’s nominees, Rock took the stage and spent virtually his entire monologue […]

Experimenting with the “voice” telling a story is a fundamental tool of the fiction-writing trade. Narrators come in a wide variety of styles, from first-person intimate, to unreliably distanced, to godlike in knowledge and perception. The way a story is told is just as important—sometimes more so—than the story itself. Still, most narrators are more or less conventional. They […]

As award-winning author Emma Donoghue made clear in her breakthrough novel Room, she is a master of tight spaces: both the physically cramped confines of a single small area in which a woman and her young child are held prisoner, and the inside of a character’s mind. With her latest novel, The Wonder, set mostly in a small cottage in a […]