Posts by author
Charley Locke
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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 childhood spent playing Suspended and The Bard’s Tale II. Or…
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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 professor of Spanish and multicultural and gender studies at Chico…
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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 why does it prompt ubiquitous eye-rolls? Dive into the history…
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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 by “the late porn baron Paul Raymond.” Today, the poem…
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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 James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, on…
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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 password protection, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams may have…
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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 captivating almost-duplicates. To become a top-rate teenage sleuth, you’ve got…
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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 emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn…
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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 others, writes about the strange, wholly imagined parallel worlds of…
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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 comma. Over at the Guardian, Steven Pinker defends his choice to…
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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 the American West does. Claire Vaye Watkins, author of short…
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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 and Steven Weinberg.) Kloss and Kish (who also illustrated every…