Reviews and essays by Robert Fay.
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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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