Reviews and essays by Robert Fay.
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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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