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Charley Locke

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.
  • Charley Locke

    Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee

    “If an intelligent life form has built a spaceship, there’s the question of ‘why not make it out of stone or coral?’” Good question. Is there an alien spaceship at the bottom of the Baltic? In scientific search for the perfect pop…

  • Charley Locke

    Jay Gatsby’s Back

    Jay McInerney explains why the American classic The Great Gatsby, the last book that Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Kate Geiselman loved, is making a resurgence this year. After all, Jimmy Gatz “invents a hero called Jay Gatsby and then inhabits this creation, just as…

  • Charley Locke

    Chuck Palahniuk’s “victims of his gore-filled prose”

    On June 11, Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Choke, published Invisible Monsters Remix, a director’s cut of the novel in which “the reader is made to jump back and forth to different chapters rather than read in a linear…

  • Charley Locke

    The Latest Diary of Adrian Mole, Coming of (Middle) Age

    Adrian Mole, protagonist of the coming-of-age novels The Adrian Mole Diaries, faces adult problems in Sue Townsend’s latest book, the 10th in the series. “Having had his first incarnation aged 13 ¾, when spots, poetry and his parents’ behavior were among…

  • Charley Locke

    E-Books: “the book-cover equivalent of burqas”

    In the Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli bemoans the rise of e-books for taking away “the genuine soul” that “the randomness and variety and art work of a tangible book being cradled by a commuter” lends to the city. Plus, it…

  • Charley Locke

    Musical Effects

    At The Chronicle, Mark Edmundson, English professor at University of Virginia, explains the emotional importance of pop music, as it “suggests, by its easy, pleasurable repetitions,” that our “static inside” makes sense, as “we can pretend, for the duration of a…

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    Charley Locke

    Existential Ménage-à-Trois

    Andy Martin, author of The Boxer and the Goalkeeper, writes about the woman called Wanda who ended the “bromance” between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. “Camus was the new kid on the block, confronted by the great metropolitan circle of critics and…

  • Charley Locke

    Lou Reed, the poet

    Lou Reed, member of The Velvet Underground, wrote a poem, “O Delmore how I miss you,” to his college professor Delmore Schwartz in Poetry Magazine. “Reading Yeats and the bell had rung but the poem was not over you hadn’t…

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    Charley Locke

    Women Better at Sex Writing?

    Martin Amis, whose new novel made it onto the PW Best Summer Books list, explained to his audience at the Hay Festival that “women write better about sex.” “As a novelist you are in a God-like relation to what you…

  • Charley Locke

    “Bradbury Was My Man”

    Junot Díaz, author of the last book Jordan Alam loved, mourns Ray Bradbury, writing of how the “prescient lyrical writer with an abiding hatred for intolerance” inspired “many of our most famous dreamers” and gave Díaz his “first real taste…

  • Charley Locke

    I Am Spartacus!

    In an interview with Royal Young, Kirk Douglas, iconic screen legend and son of Russian immigrants, tells tales of breaking the blacklist in HUAC-era Hollywood. His memoir, I Am Spartacus!: Making A Film, Breaking The Blacklist, comes out tomorrow. “I…