Hothouse
Literary Journal
Category: Two Cents
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By Harmony Moura Burk The portrayal of womanhood in literature situates the reader to always look, but never touch the characters before them. As untouchable beauties, chaste maids, and distressed virgins, women appeal to their male counterparts by remaining desirable, but they can never actualize this desire lest they become their own foils—the prostitute, the…
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Has anyone mentioned that it’s been a hard year? Unprecedented times? They have? Oh well, we’ll skip that part then and instead talk about the positives that shone through this last year. While we dealt with these… never-before-seen times, most of us found comfort in art. So, we present to you not a meditation on…
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by Skylar Epstein In his 2001 novel, Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright posits that there are intellectual pitfalls in analyzing a medium like comic books too deeply. Why? Because they’re just for fun. Comic books are entertainment for kids and teenagers, so the argument goes that attempting to apply the same methods of analysis…
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by Megan Snopik The novel-to-screen-adaptation discussion has always been tumultuous, with one never quite living up to the “hype” of the other. The idea that the book is always better has also been debated in recent times, as quality film and television become instantly accessible to the home audience through streaming services like Netflix, Hulu,…
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By Scotty Villhard Before you read this article, please know that several sensitive and potentially triggering topics will be mentioned, including corpses, suicide, and references to anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, racism, and ableism. In addition, there will be spoilers for Swiss Army Man, True Stories, and The Midnight Gospel. It’s weird. It’s all very, very weird. And…
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By Skylar Epstein Earlier this month, I wrote about how audiodramas were carrying the torch of science fiction and telling incredibly diverse stories using an innovative medium. I mentioned a few notable audiodramas in my previous article, so I’ll be expanding on those here and introducing even more recommendations in this article. To give some…
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By Megan Snopik *Before you read this article, please know that several sensitive and potentially triggering topics will be mentioned, including suicide, self-harm, and sexual violence. What do Bertha Mason, Edna Pontellier, Esther Greenwood, and Britney Spears all have in common? Only one of them has a 14-times platinum single, but all of them have…
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by Scotty Villhard What turns a swindler into a con artist? What separates your ordinary robbers from your gentleman thieves? What is the distinction between a burglary and a heist? Media is full of these confidence folk, criminals of the finest quality. They can be found in films like Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and novels like…
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by Stephanie Pickrell As a writer and an English major, the word “canon” is my biggest pet peeve. Not the kind of canon that determines which books are considered among the “great works” of a genre (although who decided that, anyway?), but the kind found most often in fanfiction forums. It’s a relatively new word,…
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by Christie Basson These quotes are meant to encourage, uplift, and celebrate women today by remembering the generations who came and wrote before us. Spanning more than four thousand years, these words have traveled time and space to find us, penned by individuals who have experienced every walk of life. Written by women of all…
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From Frankenstein to Firefly, science fiction has taken many forms and encompassed all different kinds of stories. This means that there is boundless potential for creativity under a very broad umbrella, but it does make it hard to pin down exactly what someone means when they talk about science fiction. As a previous Hothouse article…
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by Megan Snopik In Virginia Woolf’s famous essay, A Room of One’s Own, she attempts – in preparation of two lectures intended for female college students – to answer why, as of 1929, there have not been as many great female writers as male. Praised in its second-wave feminist heyday, this essay was crucial to…
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