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The Freelancers’ Roundtable

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Eva Holland | Longreads |February 2016 | 25 minutes (6,339 words)

 

There’s been more talk than usual lately about the state of freelance writing. There are increasing numbers of tools for freelancers: among them, the various incarnations of “Yelp for Journalists.” There’s advice floating around; there are Facebook support groups.

With the exception of one 10-month staff interlude, I’ve been freelancing full time now for seven and a half years. I’ve learned a few things along the way, but I also still have a ton of questions, and often feel as if I’ve outgrown some of the advice I see going by in the social media stream.

So I gathered a handful of well-established freelance writers and asked them to participate in a group email conversation about their experiences and advice. Josh Dean is a Brooklyn-based writer for the likes of Outside, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science. Jason Fagone lives in the Philadelphia area and has recently published stories in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Matter, and Grantland. May Jeong is based in Kabul, and has written for publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and Al-Jazeera America. (She managed to fit in her contributions to this roundtable while reporting from a remote corner of Afghanistan, so thank you, May.) As for me, I live in Canada’s northern Yukon Territory, and my work has appeared in AFAR, Pacific Standard, Smithsonian, and other places on both sides of the border. Read more…

The Problem With Hollywood’s Portrayal of Pregnant Women

The post-apocalyptic thriller Mad Max: Fury Road has been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award, numerous Producer Guild of America awards, two Golden Globes, and an Academy Award for Best Picture. It’s been hailed as a stealth feminist masterpiece—and it is! But it also contributes to a larger problem: Nobody knows anymore what a pregnant woman looks like.

The plot of Mad Max centers on the escape attempt of several women who have been sexually abused by the monomaniacal cult-leader Immortan Joe. They are as nubile and scantily clad as the patriarch is decrepit and disgusting. A scene in which they take a break in the desert to drink some water resembles nothing so much as a bikini car wash. Read more…

The Aristocratic Chef: An Interview with Daniel Le Bailly de La Falaise

Photo © Max Vadukal

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | February 2016 | 14 minutes (3,672 words)

 

“The most stylish chef in the industry,” according to Vogue Paris. “A fairy tale child,” according to fashion editor André Leon Talley, “straight out of a gothic novel.” The grandson of Maxime de La Falaise, a 1950s beauty who wrote for American Vogue and played muse to Andy Warhol. The nephew of Loulou de La Falaise, the afflatus of Yves Saint Laurent. The great-nephew of Mark Birley, who ruled London nightlife with Annabel’s and Harry’s Bar. And on and on.

Daniel Le Bailly de La Falaise has always had much to live up to.

Yet even from his younger years, Daniel parried the pressure with aplomb. He modeled for Vogue Paris as a wispy seventeen year-old. He acted in plays on the West End alongside Michael Gambon. It was the same path of aristocratic, creative urbanity that his forebears lived so well.

But one day, he realized it wasn’t quite the life for him.

“I asked myself the question of whose career I coveted and I couldn’t really come up with the answer,” Daniel told me over the phone from Bolinas, California. “I wanted control over what my life would be and cooking was something that I had always done.”

So cook he did.

He was slated to start work at the River Café, a respected Italian eatery on the banks of the Thames, but his great-uncle Mark Birley challenged him. “If you’ve got the balls, if you’ve got balls, Danny, you’ll start at Harry’s Bar,” Daniel recounted him saying in reference to the members-only Mayfair restaurant founded by his great uncle. “He thought I’d make a week and in the end I did years there.”

Today, Daniel lives mostly on an estate near Toulouse, France, with his wife, Molly, and infant son, Louis. He manages Le Garde-Manger de La Falaise, an exclusive line of oils and vinegars sold at Selfridges in London and at Claus in Paris, and he is the author of a recent book from Rizzoli called Nature’s Larder.

But his central work remains cooking. He cooks for himself, his family, and his friends, but he also caters celebrity and fashion events, which take place mostly in Paris, London, and Milan. He catered Kate Moss’ wedding and, most recently, he was in charge of a 125-person dinner at the Château de Courances in northern France for the Olsen twins’ fashion brand, The Row.

Although Daniel’s provenance is one of sophistication and blue blood, he eschews pretension. His favorite food is spaghetti alle vongole and, as he puts it, “there is no better luxury than really distilled simplicity.”

Daniel spoke to me about the pressures of aristocracy, the sexuality of food, and what cooking for the rich and famous really takes. Read more…

This Better and Truer History

J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz | The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy | Viking | Sep. 2015 | 19 minutes (4,835 words)

 

The Good Story is a new book-length discussion between J.M. Coetzee—a nobel laureate renowned for the complicated treatments of morality, accountability and truth in his work—and Arabella Kurtz, a clinical psychologist with a background in literary studies. The following excerpt is the book’s sixth chapter, and appears courtesy of Viking Books.

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In this chapter:

Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and their truth status. Postmodern ‘as if’ notions of the truth. What ‘as if ’ therapeutic solutions might look like. Treating reality, in literature, as simply one fiction among many. Delusions and the truth status of delusions: the case of Don Quixote. Quixote’s challenge: Is an invented ideal truth sometimes not better than the real truth? The truth status of memories. Historians and how they deal with past (remembered) events. Settler societies and unsettling memories of an often genocidal past.

The patient’s story as a subjective truth. Enacting that truth in the consulting room: a case history. Incomplete truths, and the therapist’s role in filling out the missing parts. Progression from subjective truth to fuller subjective truth. ‘Authenticity’ as an alter- native term to subjective truth. The importance of holding on to the notion of truth. Truth as process in psychoanalysis (Hanna Segal). The moment of recognition (recognising the truth) in therapy.

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Julie Blackmon/Robert Mann Gallery

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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The Queen of the Night

Illustration by Carl J. Ferrero, Design by Sarah Samudre

Alexander Chee | First Chapter Exclusive: The Queen of the Night | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | Feb. 2015 | 21 minutes (5,292 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is the first chapter from The Queen of the Night, the second novel by award-winning writer Alexander Chee, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers

“In the opening pages of The Queen of the Night, we are transported to a celebratory night at The Luxembourg Palace in Paris, 1882, where a legendary opera singer, Lilliet Berne, is trying to avoid attention (self-conscious of a poorly-designed dress she must wear), only to step accidentally into an intimate conversation with a writer who wants to put her at the center of a new opera. The one trophy missing on her crowded shelf is an original role in a new work, and she throws caution away as the stranger flatters her with the offer. As the soprano with the delicate voice tempts fate, we learn of her long-kept secrets, deep ambition, quick wit, and keen powers of observation. In Berne, Alexander Chee has created a fully-formed diva from a glamorous age that has long since passed, yet her role as her own mythology builder is as contemporary as ever, as seen daily in tabloids and online, as actors, athletes, fashionistas, Kardashians, politicians, Real Housewives, and yoginis shape their stories for column inches and Instagram followers—some, like Berne, have true talent. Chee’s Queen of the Night is a spectacular and balletic historical novel, its intricacies offer insights not only about fame, but also about the Second Empire in France and its rich musical and literary history.”

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WHEN IT BEGAN, it began as an opera would begin, in a palace, at a ball, in an encounter with a stranger who, you discover, has your fate in his hands. He is perhaps a demon or a god in disguise, of­fering you a chance at either the fulfillment of a dream or a trap for the soul. A comic element—the soprano arrives in the wrong dress—and it decides her fate.

The year was 1882. The palace was the Luxembourg Palace; the ball, the Sénat Bal, held at the beginning of autumn. It was still warm, and so the garden was used as well. I was the soprano.

I was Lilliet Berne. Read more…

The Remnants of War: A Meditation on Peleliu

Photo: Nadia Monteith

Anna Vodicka | Longreads | January 2016 | 12 minutes (3,051 words)

On Peleliu, the roads are paved with coral—a once-living thing, a hardy animal. The coral came from the inland ridges and valleys of this two-by-six-mile speck among specks in the island nation of Palau, in western Micronesia, an almost invisible scene in the shadow of bigger acts in the Pacific, where land itself is a kind of debris, cast from the ocean by tectonic clashes and shifts that left things topsy-turvy, bottom-up, fish-out-of-water. Before: an underwater reef, an ecosystem of competitive individuals. After: a coral atoll bleaching into a future island paradise. Something new under the sun.

During World War II’s Pacific theater of operations, the coral was harvested, carted, crushed, and laid at the feet of foreign militaries that took turns stripping Peleliu from the inside out. The Japanese landed first, evacuating locals and engineering a complex subterranean network of five hundred natural and man-made caves, bunkers and tunnels that still make up the island underground. Next, the Americans came in waves, and died in waves. In September, 1944, the first boats struck reef, forcing soldiers to sprint knee-deep for shore, where the Japanese waited undercover. For better aerial views, the U.S. experimented with a new technology: Corsairs rained napalm bombs from the sky, stripping the island naked, exposing rock and rotting machinery where jungle used to be. To win the battle, Americans used flamethrowers to trap the Japanese in their hives, then sealed off the entrances. Read more…

Narcissiana: On Collecting

Rudolf II painted as Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons, by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Rudolf was an avid collector. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Fredrik Sjöberg | The Fly Trap | Pantheon | translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal | June 2015 | 12 minutes (3,476 words)

Below is an excerpt from The Fly Trap, by Fredrik Sjöberg, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.  Read more…

Resolving to Read, Write, and Travel More in 2016

Let’s be real: My 2016 resolutions are intentionally vague. I tend toward self-loathing, so settling on achievable goals is important for my mental health. But I’m still excited for a fresh year and a fresh start, even if time is a social construct. My intentionally vague, utterly achievable resolutions are as follows: Read more…

10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2016

Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li (Photo by Don Feria/Getty Images for The MacArthur Foundation Awards, via Wikimedia Commons)

Below is a guest post from Mumbai-based writer-filmmaker—and longtime #longreads contributor—Pravesh Bhardwaj (@AuteurPravesh). Read more…