The National Book of America, According to Borges
The English tend to be reserved, reticent, but Shakespeare flows like a great river, he abounds in hyperbole and metaphor—he’s the complete opposite of an English person. Or, in Goethe’s…
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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.
I’ll Have an Everlasting Gobstopper With My Big Mac, Please
Young British bibliophiles may have found the Golden Ticket. In a six-week campaign backed by the National Literacy Trust (NLT), McDonald’s will offer chapters from Roald Dahl’s books with its…
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Comic Book Nerd
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “The Case for Reparations,” Between the World and Me, and, most recently, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” will continue highlighting the societal…
Humpty Dumpty, the Original Mansplainer
I can explain all the poems that were ever invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented yet. No, that’s not the obnoxious guy from your Wallace Stevens seminar—that’s Lewis…
Valeria Luiselli’s Book Club at the Jumex Factory
To write her new novel, The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli got ongoing book club feedback from workers at the Jumex factory featured in the novel. Over at Broadly,…
Mary Karr, Queen of the Memoir, on that “Low-Rent Form”
I stopped putting things in quotation marks because I really wanted the reader to continue to understand or believe or think that he or she was in my head. Listen…
Poet Laureate Grew Up a Migrant Worker, Seeing Poetry All Around Him
Those are some deep landscapes of mountains and grape fields and barns and tractors; families gathering at night to have little celebrations in the mountains and aquamarine lakes way down…
Those Who Dwell Under New York
A consequence of darkness is mystery. The farther underground I went, the more mysterious the people became. More over at Lit Hub from Colum McCann about getting to know the thousands…
Marilynne Robinson on Being an American
When Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity, when Americans abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm that would not…
Fifty Shades of Gray Bonnets
Whether readers are motivated by a hazy Luddism or a nostalgia for the old male-supremacist order of things, there’s no mistaking the potent commercial lure of the “bonnet books.” Over…
The Last Essay
In Oliver Sacks’s last published essay, he writes about a patient who underwent surgery to take away his seizures caused by Klüver-Bucy syndrome—and left him with an insatiable appetite: for…
I Get My Favorite Short Stories From the CIA
The Kenyon Review. Mundo Nuevo. The Paris Review. Check out whether you’ve been unknowingly colluding with secret agents whilst reading your favorite lit mags. Patrick Iber writes, “The CIA became…