Reviews and essays by Robert Fay.

  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • Kerouac’s ‘Big Sur’ Now a Movie

    When asked about the novels of Jack Kerouac Truman Capote quipped: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” His famed comment underscores Kerouac’s mixed reputation as a writer, both then and now. Kerouac’s output was certainly uneven, but his ambition for the novel and his vision for a new American prose was both genuine and compelling; Kerouac’s…

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  • The Legend of Gary Shteyngart’s Blurbs

    A smart, amusing look at the strange publishing practice of blurbing new books and how Russian-born novelist Gary Shteyngart has emerged as a kind of blurbing king pin who will seemingly blurb just about anything, and do it with real flair. The short 15-minute video has dozens of interviews with New York writers, critics and editors,…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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