A Game About a Memoir About Games
Michael Clune learned about the space between our own minds and those of others through video games. You can bridge that mental space by reading Gamelife, his memoir of a…
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Charley Locke
107 posts
You can find Charley Locke's journalism on WIRED, tweets @CHARLEY_LOCKE, and drawings on her parents' fridge. You can also sometimes spot Charley imperiously making book recommendations while managing the McSweeney's Pop-Up Shops.
How to Get More Lit By Cuban Authors on US Campuses
It’s a bear to try to get contemporary Cuban literature, especially by women. To remedy the dearth of books written by female Cuban authors on American campuses, Sara Cooper, a…
The Downfall of the Pun
Punning surprises us by flouting the law of nature which pretends that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Where does the pun come from? And…
New Dylan Thomas Poem, Fresh Off the Presses
It’s the literary equivalent of a lost Beatles track. In 1942, Dylan Thomas published a poem in Lilliput magazine. Shortly thereafter, the magazine went defunct, and its archives were acquired…
Marlon James Knows It’s Over
When you’re 15 and a reject, you’re looking for communion, even if you would never admit it. I wanted a painting of myself, but I got a mirror instead. Marlon…
Rose is a Rose is a Password
Sophisticated potentates/misrepresenting Emirates. That couplet may not win any Griffins or Pushcarts, but it could keep the hackers at bay. According to USC computational linguists and their “Poetry Method” of…
Nancy Drew, Girl Detective and Mentally Unstable Shape-Shifter
In her many faces, the detective has always been both infinite and infinitely replicable, a paper-doll chain folded easily into a single entity, or expanded accordion-style into a string of…
Three Hundred Pages of Henry David Thoreau’s Cabin Porn
Over at the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz takes aim at beloved transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau for being a humorless hypocrite, abstinence booster, and uninformed impugner of innocent jam-makers: The man who…
The Lobster, or a Critique of Circe’s New Dating App
In a world where no romantic attachment meant you were turned into an animal, which creature would your lonely self choose? Francine Prose, author of Bullyville, Blue Angels, and many…
Stephen Pinker, Deplorer of the Dangling Modifier
After having written 800 pages on torture, rape, world war, and genocide, it was time to take on some really controversial topics like fused participles, dangling modifiers, and the serial…
Gold, Fame, Citrus, Belonging, Possibility
The West for me is a haunted place. There are these mythic ghosts everywhere you go. I don’t know of a region that buys its own bullshit more so than…
Kloss, Kish, and the Great White Whale
Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake aside, it’s hard to imagine a more mutualistic artist-writer pair than Robert Kloss and Matt Kish. (The Rumpus also recommends the duo of Casey Scieszka…