Posts by author
Charley Locke
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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 periodical—but that anonymity may have been short-lived. (Well, sort of.)…
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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, to augment the precious burden of my gratitude. UT Austin’s…
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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 self-confidence that anyone who knows any Nigerians knows well. Put…
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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 14,000 metaphorical connections, sourced from 4,000,000 lexical data points by…
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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. Author Junot Diaz writes about the first time he got…
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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 of the US government, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s…
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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 Pevear (who have been married for 33 years) have translated…
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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 how prayer helps one derive meaning in a creative life.
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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 guest. In its author’s privilege and its message of youthful…
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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 on its way without knowing when exactly it will arrive.…
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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 different from therapeutic journaling? Minogue takes a look at how…
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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, the ideas man; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Paul, the cute…