Paper Trail

Ruth Reichl remembers editor Susan Kamil; Jhumpa Lahiri on the importance of translation


Jhumpa Lahiri. Photo: Lynn Neary

Ruth Reichl remembers her editor Susan Kamil, who died earlier this week at the age of sixty-nine. “Susan’s ability to read my mind astonished me; our editing sessions often felt like a visit to a psychiatrist,” she writes. “Memoir or novel, it was exactly the same. Even fictional characters were so real to Susan that she wanted to know what they were feeling, doing, wearing, even when they stepped off the page.”

“Language is the substance of literature, but language also locks it up again, confining it to silence and obscurity,” says Jhumpa Lahiri on the importance of translation. “Only works in translation can broaden the literary horizon, open doors, break down the wall.”

Medium is launching another publication. Marker will be a business-focused website featuring “deeply reported, engaging narratives about the biggest businesses in the world” that will help readers “learn from the successes, struggles, and failures of companies, leaders, and legends.”

The Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick reports on the closure of ThinkProgress and the changing plans that owner Center for American Progress has had for the website. now be archived.

Folio looks at the waning power of the “September Issue” in the magazine world.

Literary Hub rounds up the initial reviews of the film adaptation of The Goldfinch and the results are “not good.”

In his struggle to report on the contents of a mysterious building on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, Insider’s J. K. Trotter reflects on the different motivations behind investigative journalism. “Every reporter has a personal theory of journalism — a mental model of the entire process that explains why they bother with it in the first place. One might think their job is about informing readers, or speaking truth to power, or helping people live better lives, or bringing about societal change, and so on,” he writes. “My own theory is that journalism is about solving mysteries — identifying the unknown and finding a way to know it. That is a little embarrassing to admit, with its connotations of Scooby Doo and alien abductions. But it’s why I do it.”