Category: My Essays

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • ‘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.