Charles Dickens is a Tattle-Tale
Get ready for the biggest piece of gossip to hit the Victorian litmag scene in 250 years. Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Gaskell all wrote anonymously for Charles Dickens’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.
Joseph Conrad’s Thank-You Note to Henry James
Clothed in the wonderful garment of your prose, they have stood, consoling, by my side under many skies,” Conrad wrote. “I trust that you will consent, by accepting this copy,…
Teju Cole Made You a Mixtape
This is a Lasgidi of the mind, representing a meld of many club nights in Lagos and alternate Lagoses through the past decade. It is a cauldron of that vertiginous…
How to Chart a Course Through the Metaphors in Your Mind
Why do we refer to our minds in terms of seas and cartography, anyway? Find out by consulting your sextant and the first online metaphor map. The chart boasts over…
Junot Diaz on Overcoming Fear
Eventually the bruises and the rage faded, but not the fear. The fear remained. An awful withering dread that coiled around my bowels — that followed me into my dreams.…
What You Can Read at the Guantánamo Bay Detainee Library
Prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay have access to 18,000 books in 18 different languages, including Arabic translations of King Lear, Anna Karenina, and Stephen King thrillers. But books deemed critical…
Preserving Dostoevsky’s Prose
What’s one English word to sarcastically communicate Russian cosmopolitan refinement? How would you translate a page-long sentence from Tolstoy, or “the cacophonous competing voices of Dostoevsky”? Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard…
A Prayer from Flannery
Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted. Juan Vidal examines how T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Madeleine L’Engle approach prayer, and…
Joan Says Goodbye, Taylor Says Hello
Andrew Bomback steps into the conversation between Eula Biss and Joan Didion about “Goodbye to All That” and the myth of New York City, bringing along Taylor Swift as his…
Like Peeping Over the Edge of the World
“It’s like peeping over the edge of the world while remembering you’ve left your spectacles on the kitchen table,” she writes of her cruelly paradoxical situation: knowing that death is…
Live-Tweeting Grief
“The challenge of memorializing doesn’t favor professionals,” writes Sean Minogue over at Full Stop. So, how are autobiographical narratives of loss by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Joan Didion, or Paul Auster…
Which Norwegian Author Is Your Favorite Beatle?
I think of the four elder statesmen of Norwegian letters as a bit like the Beatles: Per Petterson is the solid, always dependable Ringo; Dag Solstad is John, the experimentalist,…