Reviews and essays by Robert Fay.
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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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