$500,000 annual home improvements? $125,000 allotted for annual “domestic salaries and expenses?” A $95,000 tutor for Gwyneth Paltrow’s 5-year old? New York Magazine‘s “Celebrity Economy” package is as thorough and informative as it is revolting.
Fame: A P&L
Lost and Found in Translation
“The Google Translate results feel less and less lucky as the sentence progresses, and with each new roll of the search engine dice.” Over the six years that Esther Allen was translating Argentine novelist Antonio Di Benedetto‘s classic, Zama, she would occasionally run lines through Google translate as an experiment in the ersatz. Pair with translator Alison Anderson on “Ferrante Fever” and what a great translation adds to the original work.
Saddle Club
Without the influence of Black Beauty, current opinions of horses and preadolescent girls’ reading lists might have looked very different.
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Claire Messud on Edith Wharton’s Clear and Complex Vision
Claire Messud reflects on one of Edith Wharton's most memorable characters, Undine Spragg from The Custom of the Country.
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What Do Essay Prompts Mean to You?
You may have heard that Tufts University’s latest application forms use the term YOLO in one of their essay prompts. Herewith, a few more essay prompts, courtesy of Stacy Brook at The Hairpin.
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Nevertheless the Artiste Persisted
“A quick scan of the literature shows that the writerly gaze has been most often turned on male artists and their creative processes and passions.” Claire V Mullins aims to redirect this gaze with a list for Electric Literature of 11 novels about female artists, including Zadie Smith‘s latest, Swing Time, which we reviewed last year. Related: Elizabeth Silver on the rise of strong female characters and the death of the literary ingénue.
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Pictures of You(th)
The good people over at The Rumpus have added another fantastic essay to their Albums of Our Lives series. This week, it’s Jonathan Kime who gives The Cure’s crushing, overwhelmingly melancholic 1989 album Disintegration the track-by-track treatment. Earlier iterations included Sufjan Stevens and Jason Isbell.
Using Faulkner
Glen David Gold encourages young writers to “cultivate literary friendships”, but he’d like to add one thing: “for Christ’s sake, do not let them become transactional.”
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