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Jewish-Arab Coexistence and the Lost Cosmopolitanism
In André Aciman’s 1994 memoir Out of Egypt, he recounts the first meeting of his two grandmothers in an Alexandria, Egypt fish market. They two women discover they are both of Italian ancestry, by way of Ottoman Turkey, and as they talk further, “it suddenly occurred to them that of the six or seven languages…
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Defending Mothers: The Algerian Ghosts in Gaza and Israel
Zohra Drif strode into the Milk-Bar in Algiers on a hot September day in 1956. She ordered a milk shake, sat down, and calmly sipped from the straw as she checked and rechecked her wristwatch. The Milk-Bar was the largest ice cream parlor in Algiers, and a favorite stop for French-Algerian families, the pied noirs,…
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The Calvinism in Our Literature
Martin Luther spent the winter of 1522 hiding at Germany’s Watburg Castle. It was a smart move, for he had challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly on biblical interpretation and the pardoning of sins, and was not likely to receive a Christmas card, or much else in terms of support, from Pope Adrian VI that…
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Life, Literature & The Everything Novel
Last year I wrote an essay in 3 Quarks Daily trying to clarify my thoughts on “the total novel” or what I’ve started calling “the everything novel.” This is the land of Joyce, Gaddis, Musil and other giants. I took the essay, entirely reworked the middle and the ending, and recorded it for the Feeling…
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In Search of the Writer-Diplomat Tradition
Marcel Proust is forever being lost to myth, reduced either to a gossip who chronicled Parisian salons, or even worse, a withdrawn asthmatic overly sentimental for the past. This reduction makes no room for Proust’s admiration for technology or the diplomats and military men who made statecraft and war. Proust adored automobiles and was fascinated…
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DeWitt Planned to Publish ‘Lightning Rods’ Before ‘The Last Samurai’
Helen DeWitt’s struggles with the publishing industry have been well documented. She famously battled the copy editors of her first publisher regarding the correct typesetting of certain passages in her novel The Last Samurai (2000), which had pages of classical Greek and also Japanese characters (hiragana, katakana and kanji). In a 2016 Vulture profile of…
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Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson
It’s a massive book, it’s nearly 50-years-old, but it has been republished by the New York Review of Books press, and some critics are calling it a masterpiece. I took a less enthusiastic view. You can check out my essay on Anniversaries and my attempt to define the “everything novel” in 3 Quarks Daily, as…
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Writing for ‘3 Quarks Daily’
If you’re like me, you probably find keeping up with the best writing on the web a daily struggle. That’s why Arts & Letters Daily is such a key site for me and so many others, trying to read and share great articles. Inspired by the aggregator model, S. Abbas Raza founded 3 Quarks Daily in 2004,…
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The Epistolary Insights of Aging Writers
One can only hope that our greatest writers today are carrying on significant email correspondences with one another–and that one day we’ll have access to these exchanges. I can’t say I’ve seen anything like this yet, no hint of The Collected Emails of David Foster Wallace or Christopher Hitchens: The Yahoo! Years. Last fall I received an advanced…
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Anxiety & The Writing Life
When I decided to write about Tim Parks’ new essay collection Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations between Them, I didn’t intend to write about panic attacks, anxiety and the emotional toll of the writing life, but these themes curiously bubbled up to the surface. I was also writing it for The Millions,…
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Japanese Novelist Hideo Furukawa & Fukushima
I recently wrote a review of Hideo Furukawa’s new novel Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima for The Quarterly Conversation. Furukawa is a native of Fukushima and his memoir-like novel recounts elements of his journey back to Fukushima in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that…
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My Review of “Feast of Excess”
I recently reviewed the book Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility for the Los Angeles Review of Books. The book surveys 22 years of American cultural history (1952 to 1974) and looks at a range of artists, including Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Thomas Pynchon, Marlon Brando, Jerry Lee Lewis, Andy Warhol, Anne Sexton,…
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New Nonfiction Story in The MacGuffin
I have a new nonfiction story in the Spring 2015 issue of The MacGuffin literary journal titled Fin de Siècle. It is a memoir piece about growing up in Bridgewater, Mass., in the 1970s. You can order a copy at the NewPages Magazine Webstore.
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Review of “Small Victories” in LA Review of Books
I reviewed the book “Small Victories” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. A fascinating account of one couple’s lifetime journey collecting and cataloging American fine art prints.
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Review of Arts & Entertainments
I published a review of Christopher Beha’s second novel Arts & Entertainments in the January print edition of First Things. The review is now available online. Beha, a deputy editor at Harper’s Magazine, is a fine novelist and his debut work What Happened to Sophie Wilder? is worth checking out as well.
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Philip K. Dick, the Unreliability of Language & the Writer’s Struggle
The following is an email from Roman Tsivkin to myself regarding an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books titled “Writing is a Lonely Business: James McKimmey, Philip K. Dick, and the Lost Art of Author Correspondence” by Jason Starr. I think Roman’s letter is both an informative riposte to the essay, as well…
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Book Review for First Things Magazine
In the March print edition of First Things I reviewed the book The Fine Delight: Postconciliar Catholic Literature by Nicholas Ripatrazone. The review has been posted online, but to read the entire article you need a First Things subscription or must pay $1.99. Ripatrazone has written that my 2011 essay in The Millions titled “Where Have…
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French, Marcel Proust & Justice Stephen Breyer
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer recently gave an interview to the French literary journal La Revue des Deux Mondes (a review that Proust once wrote for) where he revealed his love of French literature and how he learned French by reading Marcel Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time in the original: “I read the Recherche…
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Gopnik & Compagnon Talk Marcel Proust
I discovered this wonderful video of a discussion between The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik and Marcel Proust scholar Antoine Compagnon at Columbia University’s Maison Française. Gopnik is a well-known Francophile whose essay collection From Paris to the Moon chronicles his experience living in Paris for five years. Compagnon is a Proust scholar and a professor of French…
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Keeping Up with Karl Ove Knausgård
The Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård (born 1968) is a writer worth paying attention to. His six-volume memoir/novel My Struggle has been a sensation in his native country (in a way that no such literary work could be in a country as large and as fractured as the U.S). Right now, only the first two volumes…
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New Documentary on J.D. Salinger
Like many people I first read J.D. Salinger‘s novel The Catcher in the Rye as an adolescent and was immediately smitten with Holden Caufield and the spirit of the book. Yet it wasn’t until I was older, and a much more experienced reader, that I read Franny and Zooey and his collection of short stories…
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What is Stuff? (or How to Survive Exile in France)
The French have the peculiar habit of referring to American and Brits collectively as “Anglo Saxons,” which isn’t exactly a racial or cultural description, but more a way of classifying a people oddly attached in their estimation to both hyper-commerce and 17th Century modes of Puritanism. To make matters worse, we Anglophones fail to observe the…
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Another Take on Catholic Literature & Writers
In 2011 I wrote an essay in The Millions titled “Where Have All the Catholic Writers Gone?” Little did I know that the topic would interest a great number of people, and that the piece would continue to pop-up in online discussions. Earlier this week the essay surfaced again when Nick Ripatrazone penned an article…
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Some Fun with Novelist Gary Shteyngart
Today my friend Roman Tsivkin and I had some fun with the Russian-born novelist Gary Shteyngart on Twitter. My friend Roman and Shteyngart share a very similar background–both are Russian Jews, about 40, live in NYC, both were born in what used to be Leningrad, and they both look VERY MUCH alike. Roman recently posted a new…
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A Marine’s Vietnam Story & Other Writing
This month I published a creative nonfiction story titled “The Consecration” in Booth, the literary journal of Butler University. The story is taken from my recently-completed memoir, and recounts my teenage friendship with a Marine Gunnery Sergeant who had fought in Vietnam as a combat engineer. This week I also published a book review in Full Stop where I…
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Writers & Day Jobs
For my January article in Full Stop I wrote about writers and day jobs with a little intro about T.S. Eliot and his years working as a clerk at Lloyd’s bank in London. I couldn’t have imagined the interest that the article generated across the Internet over the last week and a half. There are…
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Kerouac’s ‘Big Sur’ Now a Movie
When asked about the novels of Jack Kerouac Truman Capote quipped: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” His famed comment underscores Kerouac’s mixed reputation as a writer, both then and now. Kerouac’s output was certainly uneven, but his ambition for the novel and his vision for a new American prose was both genuine and compelling; Kerouac’s…
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The Legend of Gary Shteyngart’s Blurbs
A smart, amusing look at the strange publishing practice of blurbing new books and how Russian-born novelist Gary Shteyngart has emerged as a kind of blurbing king pin who will seemingly blurb just about anything, and do it with real flair. The short 15-minute video has dozens of interviews with New York writers, critics and editors,…
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Casting Sophia Coppola in ‘The Leopard’
My Twitter friend the writer Kim Askew invited me to guest post on her site Romancing the Tome last week as part of a celebration of the release of her new book Tempestuous (co-authored with Amy Helmes). I wrote about one of my favorite novels The Leopard by the Italian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa and why director Francis Ford Coppola should use it…
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My ‘Full Stop’ Piece on David Foster Wallace
Recently I had the good fortune to be named a monthly contributor to Full-Stop Magazine. For my December piece, I wrote how I had been unknowingly “shadowing” the late-novelist David Foster Wallace across America for years. When I read the novel Infinite Jest back in 1996 or ’97, I immediately recognized that Wallace and I shared connections to…
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William Giraldi: Tough-Love Critic
A new essay or book review by critic William Giraldi has become something of an event. In a world where bloggers discuss how they “feel” about a book, and the online literati praise every new novel as if it were Ulysses, Giraldi has become the adult in the room, reminding us what true criticism can…
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Javier Marias Turns Down Literary Prize
Spanish novelist Javier Marias has turned down a €20,000 literary prize from the Spanish government.
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Javier Marias’ ‘Your Face Tomorrow’ Trilogy
I have begun re-reading the novel Fever and Spear by the Spanish novelist Javier Marias. It is the first volume in his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy that is published in the U.S. by New Directions. Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt said the books were what detective novels would sound like if Henry James had written them. Marias’…
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Henry James Meets Proust’s Characters
One of the pleasures of reading literary biographies is learning what happened when famous “writer A” met famous “writer B” for the first time. Some of the great encounters are a young James Joyce meeting W.B. Yeats (or later Samuel Beckett meeting Joyce), Oscar Wilde hiding in the Proust family bathroom, because Marcel was late, and Wilde couldn’t deal with…
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Interview with New Henry James Biographer
Henry James is the novelist whose writing straddles two centuries as well as two continents. He was an American by birth, English by residence and a European in his sensibilities. It’s generally agreed that the definitive James biography is Leon Edel’s five-volume work (I myself have the one-volume abridged version, fearing I might miss out on an entire…
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The Faith of David Foster Wallace
There have recently been a spat of blog posts and articles about the late novelist David Foster Wallace’s faith and whether the upcoming D.T. Max bio of Wallace will shed any light on this important subject. The latest round of interest in Wallace’s Christian faith (we don’t know exactly what denomination he identified with) was set off…
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Writers & Rock ‘n Roll on ‘Little Brother’
I had the privilege of being the first writer published on the new Little Brother Magazine website this week. I wrote an article on literary writers trying to be rock stars. The article gave me a great excuse to write about my adolescent musical heroes “The Smiths.” Little Brother Magazine is a new literary magazine (print-based)…
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Trailer for New ‘Anna Karenina’ Film
Fans of both Russian literature and actress Keira Knightley are rejoicing that the two will be joined together on the big screen in an upcoming film version of Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina. I recently blogged about the famed translation of Tolstoy’s novel War And Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky who also translated Anna Karenina.
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Whereby the National Book Critics Circle Mentions Me
Book critic Mark Athitakis, the respected author of the blog American Fiction Notes and editor of the National Book Critics Circle’s blog “Critical Mass,” included my essay on Yukio Mishima in one off their weekly roundups last month. It was an honor to be mentioned on the site and with so many other gifted writers. Each…
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‘First Things’ Blogs on my New ‘Full Stop’ Feature
I really love the headline that First Things gave to their blog post about my feature essay in Full Stop: “Roger Scruton and Yukio Mishima Walk into a Doughnut Shop…” That’s perfect. Read the First Things post on my essay about Mishima, Roger Scruton and beauty.
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Video of Marcel Proust’s Paris
This is an absolutely wonderful 28-minute long video titled “Proust’s Paris” which provides both expert background on the historical events unfolding in Paris during Marcel Proust’s lifetime as well as the details of his and his family’s lives. You’ll also receive a tour of the Paris neighborhoods, homes and monuments that were an important part of his life and…
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Learn French with Marcel Proust
Like most people I have yet to tackle all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but I have managed to read the first two books and Swann’s Way is a particular favorite of mine. If you are a Proustian and somehow who wants to brush up on his French, there are great…
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Marveling at Naguib Mahfouz Again
This past weekend I happened to dip into a book of stories by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and read his story/novella “The Beggar.” It was a reminder of why I’d been so astounded years ago when I’d read the first two books of his Cairo Trilogy. Here was a writer, I realized, who can…
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Los Angeles Review of Books Debuts New Site
The Los Angeles Review of Books has finally debuted their new website. It is an impressive collection of essays, reviews and interviews. Well worth visiting several times a week.
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Leo Tolstoy, Fiction and Truth
The line between truth and fiction is becoming more tenuous with the rise of “creative nonfiction” and the continued popularity of the memoir. The debate over where and how to draw the line intensified recently with the publication of the book The Lifespan of a Fact by the creative nonfiction evangelist John D’Agata with Jim…
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Like Me on Facebook
Like me on Facebook–or else. www.facebook.com/WriterRobertFay
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Send Up of Literary Hipsters
Here is a funny promo clip for the IFC series Portlandia titled “Did You Read?” that pokes fun at literary hipsters trying to outdo each with references to articles in Mcsweeney’s, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, etc.
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Vol.1 Brooklyn Links To My Essay
I was honored that the website Vol. 1 Brooklyn included a link to my new essay in The Rumpus. It was featured in their Morning Bites roundup. Check it out.
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My New Essay in The Rumpus
I have a piece up at The Rumpus today titled “The Dreams of a Shrinking Nation” which is both an essay on the Japanese mega-pop band Dreams Comes True (my wife is a big fan) as well as a light-hearted look at Japan’s current demographic problems. The occasion for the essay was an Oct. 1, 2011 appearance…
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The Odyssey of Anti-War Literature
I recently finished re-reading Homer’s The Iliad after many years. I was struck by a number of things, but primarily how Homer depicted war as both brutal and meaningful. Not only did he not sugar-coat bronze-age combat, he actually went into gruesome detail about how spears and swords devastate the human body. His detailed knowledge…
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Movie Trailer For Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’
On the road – Official trailer – (HD 1080p) by MK2diffusion William Burroughs got it right when he wrote Jack Kerouac “opened a million coffee shops and sold a million pairs of Levis.” Kerouac and his novel On The Road primed the culture for the Beats and later the ascension of the hippies and the 1960s counterculture. The actual literary influence of…
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As The Novel Lay Dying
Lately I’ve developed a tenderness for essays speculating about the “death of the novel,” or that inspiring sub-genre, “why write novels at all?” I suspect they are proof that the form still has a modicum of relevance; the very existence of such essays proves there is still something left to kill off. Contrast this with say, poetry,…
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A New Inquiry into the Habit
The New Inquiry dubs itself as a space to “enrich cultural and public life.” The site has received a lot of big-time attention in its short run and so far it seems to merit the hype. The editors, to my great surprise, recently featured a thoughtful interview with an Anglican nun named Sister Nancy Ruth. The interview touches…
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Top Five Books for Recluses
If there is one group of people who understood the impulse to retire from society now and again—it would be readers and writers. If for any reason you don’t have time to check into a hermitage for three months, here are a five books that will provide a few hours of reclusive relief. 1. Walden…
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Batuman’s Take Down of MFA Literary Fiction
I’m still on an Elif Batuman kick. I’ve been tracking down her essays online and I’m looking forward to reading The Possessed, which arrived in the mail yesterday. Batuman wrote a funny, blistering and brilliantly-argued essay in the London Review of Books in 2010 titled “Get a Real Degree” where she reviewed Mark McGurl’s history…
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Elif Batuman: A Classic 5′ 10″
Last April Elif Batuman wrote a great piece in The Guardian about life after her book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them became a best seller. The book is a memoir-like collection of essays chronicling her experiences studying the Russian masters. In the essay Batuman writes about a funny exchange between her and Jonathan…
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The New Center of Anglo-American Letters
I recommend Garth Risk Hallberg’s article “Why Write Novels at All?” in The New York Times. He looks at whether the writers at a 2006 literary conference in Italy called Le Conversazioni–Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace and Nathan Englander–constitute a new movement and whether there is a common aesthetic among them. I don’t believe they…
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Literature with an Agenda
There is an essay on the site Bookslut by Josh Cook that examines “literature with an agenda.” Cook does a good job of defending such books, and faults the influence of MFA programs (which focus strictly on craft) and early 20th Century communist propaganda as reasons why there is resistance today to books with “a message.” photo…
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Grappling With James Joyce
Grappling with James Joyce at the beginning of the 21st Century is similar to reading Shakespeare’s tragedies or even working your way through the Old Testament—you recognize immediately you are knee-deep in cultural source material. It feels less accurate to call Joyce a modernist than to say he was modernism, for it’s clear how much of our…
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Merry Christmas
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What is a Real Work of Art?
“The creation of beauty is art,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 in a slim volume called Nature. The Emerson quote provides the perfect introduction to the subject of Roger Scruton’s BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters.” Scruton is a well-known British philosopher and author most recently of Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. In the film Scruton tells us, “there is all…
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David Foster Wallace & Lit’s Thematic Poverty
There will probably come a time when our current appetite for insight about David Foster Wallace ebbs, but I don’t see that coming any time soon. I just got around to reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s fascinating review of Wallace’s The Pale King in GQ. Sullivan is a first-rate essayist and it’s great fun to see him write about…
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Full Stop For Book Lovers & Writers
While many people mourn the disappearance of Sunday book sections in newspapers across the U.S., the number of quality sites online—The Millions and The Los Angeles Review of Books come to mind— for high-quality book reviews, criticism and literary essays continues to grow. I recently spent time clicking through the excellent site Full Stop, which is…
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Writing, Making Money & Raising Kids – How It’s Done
There are times when I’ve found myself skimming through The Paris Review interviews and hoping the interviewer would stop being profound and ask the writers more pedestrian questions about their early writing life: How did you make a living in the beginning? What was your writing routine? How did you write every day and make time…
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Newsweek’s “The Daily Beast” Chimes in on My Recent Essay
Andrew Sullivan, who writes the popular “The Dish” column on Newsweek’s “The Daily Beast” website, mentioned my recent essay on Catholic writers in The Millions. The title of his post is “The Poetry of the Latin Mass.” Sullivan writes: “Robert Fay wonders why there aren’t great contemporary Catholic writers like Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and…
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Criticism As Literature Itself
“One doesn’t have any business writing about literature unless one’s business is literature,” writes William Giraldi in his fascinating treatment of critic Adam Kirsch’s new book on Lionel Trilling, Why Trilling Matters. Giraldi notes that Kirsch himself is a throwback to critic-as-intellectual and calls him: “An Ideal critic of the Coleridgean mold, he possesses a swift…
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A New York Literary Salon
The New York Times profiles a group of literary twenty-somethings in New York who–in despair over the lack of publishing jobs–have founded their own online journal The New Inquiry. They also meet on a regular basis in an Upper East Side apartment to forge their own community of ideas and books. I admire their desire to…
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Critic Maud Newton Recommended My Essay On Catholic Writers
The noted literary critic and blogger Maud Newton recommended my essay on Catholic writers in The Millions. She wrote: I recommend Robert Fay’s essay about the end of the Latin Mass — and Catholic “drama of salvation” novels — even though I strongly disagree that “the Christian faith [has] been in full cultural retreat since…
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A Few Gems from Henry James
To move from a contemporary novel to a book by Henry James is like leaving a meadow and stepping into an ancient bamboo grove where the surroundings are undoubtedly exquisite, but the trees are packed together, and if you’re careless, you’ll quickly lose your way. Henry James’ The Ambassadors (1903) is stocked with gems worthy…
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Why I Won’t Read Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights”
I was late to the party when it came to reading Joan Didion. For years I had the vague sensation that Didion wasn’t for me. It was one of those unapologetic prejudices people have for certain writers, a prejudice that ended when I picked up a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking. It was…
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The Five Most Neglected Novels of the 20th Century
The first half of the 20th century is littered with so many classic works of fiction that one would need two lifetimes to both read and re-read all the major works of those first five decades, let alone explore the minor and underappreciated novels of the period. All of the novels in my list were published after…
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Can Literature Save Us?
As a writer, former editor and lover of books it pains me to admit that literacy (or literature for that matter) doesn’t—and never will—make one a “better person.” Cambridge professor Liz Disley in her Guardian review of Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature is equally skeptical that The Enlightenment opened up new…
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Where Soldiers Come From
When I was a young boy I saw the movie The Deer Hunter on television for the first time. Although I didn’t have the emotional maturity or the historical knowledge to put it all in perspective, I was deeply moved by the film and the actors (Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken). It spawned…
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Advice For The Troubled
“It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice for everyone except Parisians.” -Muriel Spark
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Colm Toibin At Work
Love this photo of the Irish Novelist Colm Toibin at work. This is indeed the desk of a working writer.
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The Future of ‘Jobs’
“Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an…
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Muriel Spark’s “A Far Cry From Kensington”
A New Directions edition. Had the good fortune of finding the novel A Far Cry From Kensington by the British novelist Muriel Spark this past weekend. I have had Memento Mori on my shelf for some time, but have not gotten around to reading it. This New Directions edition was just $1 at Book-Off, which is…
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Sir Ken Robinson on Finding Your Passion
Although I’m tempted to call this talk by Sir Ken Robinson “Humanism Gone Wild”–for Robinson surely views mankind as an immanently perfectible being if only given the right sort of parental and societal support (I don’t share this view )–it is too engaging and interesting a lecture not to recommend to everyone. I’d also like to recommend…
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New Documentary on Walker Percy
It’s excellent news to learn that novelist Walker Percy may be getting more attention with the upcoming documentary Walker Percy: A Documentary Film. A man of the South and a Roman Catholic, his books tackle the big moral and spiritual questions that modern novelists, regrettably, have long since abandoned. It’s interesting how often his novel The Moviegoer,…
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Discussion With British Chef Marco Pierre White
In many ways I’m the last person to appreciate a talk by a famous international chef–I’m picky, American and provincial in my eating habits–yet I found this discussion by Marco Pierre White fascinating and inspiring. He is a charming, intelligent man who understands both his craft and his place in the world. The chef as artist proves true in Mr.…
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My Essay in ‘The Millions’
I recently published an essay on the online literary site The Millions titled, “Paris, Wikipedia and My Middle Age Crisis.” Each man’s middle age crisis begins at an indeterminate age and offers a peculiar window into the architecture of masculine decline. In this respect it mimics death, which is both punctual and ruthlessly efficient in…