Reviews and essays by Robert Fay.
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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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